Nathaniel Rich

Two excerpts from never-before-seen notebooks offer insights into the author's literary mind and process and includes notes on her Sacramento upbringing, her life in the Gulf states, her views on prominent locals and her experiences during a formative "Rolling Stone" assignment. "Joan Didion has always kept notebooks of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays, and copies of articles. "Notes on the South" traces a road trip...

"In the works for sixteen years, The Complete Works of Primo Levi is the most ambitious literary translation of the twenty-first century. Primo Levi, the Italian-born chemist once described by Philip Roth as that "quicksilver little woodland creature enlivened by the forest's astute intelligence," has largely been considered a heroic figure in the annals of twentieth-century literature for If This Is a Man, his haunting account of Auschwitz. Yet Levi's...