"What is Literature?" and Other Essays

Recent News

• Lessons from Plants author Beronda Montgomery discussed the evolutionary and adaptive genius of vegetation with Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness on his podcast Getting Curious.
• Gabriel Winant, author of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, spoke with Dissent about deindustrialization, the care economy, and the living legacies of the industrial workers’ movement.
• Tae-Yeoun Keum, author of Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought, explored how philosophy might embrace supposedly manipulative mythmaking for liberal ends in a conversation with BLARB: The Blog of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
• Andy Horowitz’s Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 was recently named winner of the Bancroft Prize; Nicole Fleetwood’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration and Tom Zoellner’s Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire won National Book Critics Circle Awards in the categories of criticism and nonfiction, respectively.