August 6, 2025 – "Greene's work keeps one’s mind on tiptoe. Illusions beget disillusions but also hopes; hopes beget illusions but also clarities." ...

From The Old Man by the Sea by Domenico Starnone (Europa Editions), translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky: ...

The story refers to the twins’ father’s participation in “the Slaughter, when all animal life was being extinguished by guns ...

Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the premiere of The Crucible. In this interview, Arthur Miller discusses the writing of the play, and the McCarthy hearings that inspired it.

André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t necessarily sit at a cleared table in the ...

Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start ...

An encounter with Emerson’s essays. This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as ...

October 1, 2020 – Daniel Mendelsohn on Homer, W. G. Sebald, and the looping, digressive narrative style known as ring composition.

Anne Carson and I met on Zoom last October, in the brick-red sitting room of her apartment in Reykjavik, the city where she and her husband, Robert Currie, have spent time each year since 2008. A ...

Willa Cather was not a flashy stylist, and though she was ambitious in her work, she did not attach it to a publicity-worthy life like some of her contemporaries, such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott ...

The Institute of Illegal Images (III) is housed in a dilapidated shotgun Victorian in San Francisco’s Mission District, which also happens to be the home of a gentleman named Mark McCloud. The shades ...

Doodling today is not what it was. Or is it? Google “doodle” and you’ll find the Google Doodle—what Google calls a “fun, surprising, and sometimes spontaneous” transformation of its logo by a team of ...