The Deadline: Essays

Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans' techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented--but armed--aimlessness. From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore's life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the deadline, the "river of time that divides the quick from the dead." Echoing Gore Vidal's United States in its massive intellectual erudition, The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay--and of history--itself.

Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Published: 08/29/2023
Pages: 640
Weight: 2.29lbs
Size: 9.47h x 6.49w x 1.57d
ISBN: 9781631496127


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 06/01/2023
Booklist 07/01/2023 pg. 8
Shelf Awareness 09/01/2023
BookPage 09/01/2023