In the final days of the Soviet Union, when the old icons were fast decaying and any future ones were frantically packing off to escape the ruins, the guardians of Russia’s past had few relics to showcase. One of the last heroes standing, a Stalin Prize winner and two-time Hero of Socialist Labor, was Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the world’s most famous automatic rifle, the AK-47. Even after the USSR fell, Kalashnikov—now ninety—has enjoyed an afterlife as a living monument to the days when the Kremlin’s fiat reached from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia and well into Africa. With characteristic

Jonathan Franzen is, by his own account, a divided soul. “It turns out,” he once wrote, “that I subscribe to two wildly different models of how fiction relates to its audience.” One was the Status model: high art, genius, Flaubert; the other was the Contract model: accessibility, pleasure, the community of readers. Of the two things for which Franzen is most famous (other, of course, than The Corrections, his 2001 National Book Award–winning best seller), both were public controversies that erupted from this very self-division. The first was his 1996 Harper’s essay that renounced the novel of cultural critique in

A new book, a new genre—just what you’d expect from David Mitchell. Since 1999, this wunderkind of British fiction has produced a globe-spanning chain of nine semifuturistic narratives (Ghostwritten), a coming-of-age thriller set in contemporary Tokyo (Number9Dream), a Chinese box of nested tales that take us from the nineteenth century to about the twenty-third (Cloud Atlas), and a portrait of the artist as a very young Englishman (Black Swan Green). And now for something completely different—a historical novel. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, with its stately, melancholy title, is not only, for Mitchell, a new form, it is

First came the Beats, then the hipsters, then the hippies: all within thirty years of World War II. By the 1980s, American countercultural radicalism had exhausted itself, but during its gloriously hectic run it had performed nobly enough that today it is (rightly) credited with having brought about indelible change in our politics, our social attitudes, our arts. Perhaps, most especially, our arts. It was 1950s realpolitik that did it. What had it meant, after all, to have won the fight against Nazi Germany only to be living within the straitjacket of cold-war anxiety?

In aphorism 462 of David Shields’s tenth book, the invigorating Reality Hunger, he observes, “All writing is autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it.” I’ll take that dare.

The fact of our embodiment is something we all face with greater or lesser anxiety. We navigate the world as both thinking minds and reacting bodies, with room enough for heady distortion between them. The body, in its declared state of health or illness, can be used to bolster our psychological defenses; a slew of diagnoses can be called on to explain why we’re not functioning as we think we should be. That said, though interested in all the mentally agitated, I have never felt particularly sympathetic to the suffering of hypochondriacs, having always consigned them to the vast corpus

In the late 1870s, the advent of the telephone created a curious social question: What was the proper way to greet someone at the beginning of a call? The first telephones were always “on” and connected pairwise to each other, so you didn’t need to dial a number to attract the attention of the person on the other end; you just picked up the handset and shouted something into it. But what? Alexander Graham Bell argued that “Ahoy!” was best, since it had traditionally been used for hailing ships. But Thomas Edison, who was creating a competing telephone system for

Thomas Mallon’s Yours Ever: People and Their Letters is not the history of letter writing its subtitle seems to promise. Instead, it is an amiable, very readable collection of brief essays about dozens of correspondents, almost all of whom were not just “people” but professional writers. Mark Twain and Colette, Bruno Schulz and Virginia Woolf, William Burroughs and H. L. Mencken: These are not individuals you would want at the same dinner party, but they would all grudgingly admit to belonging to the same guild. Even most of the statesmen Mallon discusses—Lincoln, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Churchill—considered themselves men of letters.