In this excruciatingly honest autobiographical work, author Mehta conducts an exquisite exploration of his love life as a young man, attempting to focus an objective lens on the most subjective of Continue reading »
Imagine: you're a middle-aged adult and your elderly parent offers you a packet of love letters ("red letters") from an adulterous relationship that took place just before you were Continue reading »
Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing
Ved Mehta
A poignant tribute from a flawed but well-placed Boswell, Mehta's book revisits (through memories, letters and interviews) the career of William Shawn, who edited the New Yorker from 1951 to 1987. Continue reading »
In 1949, at age 15, Mehta left his native India to spend three years at the Arkansas School for the Blind. In this vivid memoir, written with great sensitivity and without self-pity, he describes the Continue reading »
This sixth volume of Mehta's lively, affecting autobiography covers his experiences at Pomona College, Calif., in the 1950s, when, despite his blindness, he tried to carry on the normal life of an Continue reading »
Mehta, the well-known Indian-born writer, affectionately relives his undergraduate years at Oxford's Balliol College in an amusing, wonderfully observant, self-deprecating memoir. Despite his Continue reading »
In a quietly devastating, gripping political chronicle based on his frequent trips to India between 1982 and 1994, Indian-born Mehta, a New Yorker staff writer, ruefully portrays a nation mired in Continue reading »
Slavery After Slavery: Revealing the Legacy of Forced Child Apprenticeships on Black Families, from Emancipation to the Present
Mary Frances Berry
In this eye-opening and disturbing account, historian Berry (History Teaches Us to Resist) reveals that Black children were routinely “trafficked” by white Southerners via Continue reading »
The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne
Kate Winkler Dawson
Historian Dawson (American Sherlock) aims in this engrossing account to solve the murder that inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Catherine Read Williams’s Continue reading »
This trenchant study from literary critic Franklin (A Thousand Darknesses) chronicles the brief life of Anne Frank (1929–1945) and traces the complex ways in which her story Continue reading »
Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
Tao Leigh Goffe
In this roving, erudite debut study, Goffe, a professor of literary theory and cultural history at Hunter College, traces the attitudes and beliefs that undergird today’s Continue reading »