How to Win a Billion Dollars and Ruin Your Life
The Perfect Bet: A Review of A. Natasha Joukovsky’s Satire ‘Medium Rare’
Culture
Miller's Book Review.
Celebrating All Things Literary
Recent essays
30 of 48A Bet on American Intellectual Life—and Beyond
A Conversation with Anna Gát on the Reading Crisis and Creating Spaces for Serious Dialog to Flourish
6 Enjoyable Ways to Read Classic Novels—or Pretty Much Anything
Intimidated? Distracted? Bored? Need Another Way In? A Practical Answer to the Postliterate Panic
Split Screen: ‘Children of Men’ as Both Book and Film
Everyone’s Talking About Christopher Nolan’s ‘Odyssey.’ Let’s Examine P.D. James’s Classic Dystopian Novel and Its Big-Screen Adaptation
Before You Panic About That Atlantic Reading Piece
It’s Easy to Fear the Future When We Romanticize the Past
Best Way to See the Renaissance? Get the Panoramic View
The Try Everything Age: Reviewing Ada Palmer’s ‘Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age’
Everything I’ve Read So Far This Year
Update on Big-Ass Classics, Reading with My Kids, Plus Other Fiction and Nonfiction
Fake World: Everything You Think Is a Lie
Reviewing Philip K. Dick’s Fever Dream, ‘The Penultimate Truth’
Kurt Vonnegut’s Ambivalent War on AI
Reviewing His Prescient Debut Novel ‘Player Piano’
Literature: The Ultimate Answer to the Algorithm
Building a Solid Self in a Shaky Society: Reviewing Luke Burgis’s ‘The One and the Ninety-Nine’
50 Years of Creative Destruction in the Book World
Everything About Books Has Changed Since 1975, and That’s Mostly Good News
If the First Apocalypse Doesn’t Get You, the Second One Will
The Moon Was the Easy Part: Reviewing R.C. Sherriff’s Imaginative Classic ‘The Hopkins Manuscript’
Candice Millard and the Revival of History as Literature
Is History Boring? Only if You Write Boring History.
Why I’m Still Reading ‘Problematic’ Children’s Books to My Daughter
A Defense of Reading Great (and Imperfect) Classics Together—Without Turning Every Story into a Moral Purity Test
There Were Two Civil Wars, and We Weren’t Always Sure Which We Were Fighting
Damon Root’s ‘Emancipation War: The Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the Thirteenth Amendment’
Poor Bastard: Henry Fielding’s Triumphant ‘Tom Jones’
Samuel Johnson Called It ‘Corrupt.’ Coleridge Called It ‘Wholesome.’ Who’s Right?
Open Thread: Your Summer Reading?
What’s on Your List for the Sultry Months? Here’s a Look at Mine
Second Best? The MBR List of 101–200 Greatest Novels
What About the Books that Didn’t Make the Top 100? Here’s the MBR Shadow Canon
The Wrong Fight over AI and Writing
The Binary Debate Misses the Only Question That Really Matters
3 Ways to Make New Stuff Happen
Lessons in Innovation from Buckminster Fuller, Martin Luther King Jr., Milton Friedman, and Sonny Rollins
100 Novels MBR Readers Would Die on a Hill For
A Reader-Curated Canon
Ground Zero in the Reading Crisis
#CanonChat Founder and Educator Matt Ryan on Inspiring a New Generation of Readers
Open Thread: 100 Best Novels, Seriously?
Let’s Create Our Own List of the 100 Best Novels in English
Dickens, Doubled: The Hidden Architecture of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’
One Crime, Two Survivors, and the Three Pairs Holding the Story Together
David Copperfield: A Hero Beside the Point
Reviewing Charles Dickens’s Beloved Classic and Risking My Own Hide in the Process
Bookish Diversions: How the Pros Do It
John Grisham, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Wilfred Sheed, Joan Didion, and Edgar Allan Poe
Serious Reading Was Always a Minority Sport
Rumors of the Book’s Demise Misunderstand Who Really Reads to Begin With
Never Quite Home: 2 Incomplete Answers for a World in Flux
Dueling Dystopias: Reviewing Yoko Tawada’s ‘Scattered All Over the Earth’ Trilogy and ‘The Emissary’
We Almost Lost the Statue of Liberty, and Other Misadventures in Maintenance
Reviewing Stewart Brand’s ‘Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One’
The Terrible Books of Terrible Men
My Conversation with Daniel Kalder on What He Learned While Reading Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Gaddafi, and Other Prolific Despots