The place where dispossession, whether by choice or by circumstance, meets underground culture is having its moment in the literary sun right now. Jerry Stahl’s Happy Mutant Baby Pills and Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens both incorporate the Occupy movement into their narratives, the former as part of a politically charged cavalcade of idealists and realists at odds, the latter as the latest in a series of distinctively American revolutionary movements. One of the plotlines in Jonathan Miles’s novel Want Not centers around a young couple squatting on the Lower East Side in 2007, and their

Nobel-winning novelist Doris Lessing died last weekend at the age of 94. She published more than 50 works in her lifetime, but she also had a deep imaginative grasp of books that did not exist. In this 1990 essay, she lists and dwells on subjects (Karl Marx's home life, committee rooms) that "have never found a novelist."

In a sweeping essay on Italian painting, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Tao Lin, Zadie Smith considers the figure of the corpse, and the problem that death poses for artistic representation.

Until recently, many people—even the Nobel Peace Prize Committee—trusted Barack Obama. And even if they didn’t trust the person in the Oval Office, the American civic tradition tells them to find solace in the genius of the U.S. system of government, with its carefully calibrated array of checks and balances designed to prevent presidents from doing anything too terrible.

But the wishful thinking surrounding the Obama presidency’s role in the world has collapsed, beginning roughly around 2011, as details about the CIA’s program of covert drone operations in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and

The subtitle of Rachel Cohen’s luminous biography of legendary art critic and historian Bernard Berenson is “A Life in the Picture Trade.” This is an apt characterization given Berenson’s role in building some of the greatest private Renaissance art collections of America’s Gilded Age (most notably Isabel Stewart Gardner’s). But it’s also one that Berenson would have looked upon with more than a little horror, since admitting he engaged in any kind of “trade” would conflict with his carefully constructed self-image, worked out over a lifetime of secrecy and reinvention.

Today, Berenson is