John Livesey is a PhD candidate at University College London specializing in the work of James Baldwin. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Little White Lies, and the Oxford Review of Books.
A new book by the journalist James Marriott purports to explain the decline of literacy. Instead, it offers a narrow defense of elite culture that that pays next to no attention to the role these elites have played in destroying the culture they are now mourning.
Art critic, novelist, Marxist, lover, exile, storyteller: John Berger resisted every easy definition. His new biography embraces the contradictions he left behind.
History belongs to everyone. But if governments continue to defund national galleries, they will ensure ancient artifacts can only be seen in luxury showrooms, displayed on the coffee tables of the wealthy, and worn by celebrities on the red carpet.
For over a decade, Édouard Louis has been one of France’s most perceptive writers on his country’s working class. But as he has drifted away from this milieu, he has swapped clear-eyed analysis for cliché-ridden romanticization of the suffering poor.
The defining feature of the last decade was that everything, from food to music, was politicized. All the while, our capacity to act collectively only grew weaker. Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics sets out to explain why.
James Baldwin shaped a generation of American writers, many of whom later dismissed his humanistic outlook as naive. Today he is once again celebrated, but a new biography shows that his life was more complex than his viral fame suggests.