Bob Silvers News Today

From reading Henry Kissinger’s new book On China,1 I have learned that Mr. Kissinger met with Deng Xiaoping at least eleven times—more than with any other Chinese leader—and that the topic of one of their chats was whether Fang Lizhi would confess and repent.On June 3, 1989, Deng, chair of the Military Commission of the Communist Party of China, ordered tanks from Chinese

Peter Brown’s latest book is a genre-defying personal account of the life, work, and intellectual development of an acclaimed historian of late antiquity.

Inside the buyout at Penguin Random House and changes at Knopf. Major book editors including Shelley Wanger, Jonathan Segal and Victoria Wilson will depart.

“That’s how it started. My war, and my life.”

At a memorial service Wednesday for Joan Didion, who died in December, Vanessa Redgrave read, nephew Griffin Dunne remembered and Patti Smith sang.

The venerated New York Times editor, author of a widely lauded book defending Henry Kissinger, is stepping down from the paper.

Robert Silvers died on Monday, March 20, after serving as The New York Review of Books Editor since 1963. Over almost six decades, Silvers cultivated one of the most interesting, reflective, and lustrous stables of China writers in the world, some of whom offer their remembrances below.

She knew that her country was built on exclusion and shame.

The Roth Biography Scandal Philip Roth: The Biography—the key issue being, Was Roth a misogynist?—when both book and biographer spilled over from the review pages to Page One. “Sexual Assault Allegations Against Biographer Halt Shipping of his Book,” the New York Times announced in April. Several women accused Bailey of predatory behavior. At a Louisiana private school where he had once taught English, he was said to have “groomed” eighth-graders for later of-age seductions to rap...

California cool and Magical Thinking: Joan Didion at 86 Alex Clark © Provided by The Guardian Photograph: Everett/REX/Shutterstock To think about Joan Didion, you have to confront two things before you get to the words: the pictures and the anecdotes. If you’re interested in certain aspects of the culture – American counterculture in the 1960s, California, female writers – the pictures are familiar, if not ingrained. There’s Didion in her long dress with long hair, sm...