The man was writing like his typewriter was on fire and in flaming succession produced three books that have been called a ...

The nation is splattered with these zombie structures, or sutures, with nowhere to be and no path to total erasure.” ...

Let us consider, for example, Kafka’s elegant diary entry on 2 August 1914: ‘Germany has declared war on Russia—Swimming in the afternoon.’ From Xiao Hai’s memoir Adrift in the South (Granta Editions) ...

A sense of stagnation and stillness when what I want is for the book to open, open, open into something expansive and true.

William Blake had me thinking about death. I was lying on my couch, Norton Anthology in my lap, when I stumbled on Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose.” I’d read the poem before, and I remembered its famous ...

In 1934, Columbia University moved its twenty-two miles of books to the newly built Butler Library. By means of a really long slide. Which actually looks less fun than it sounds, and was much too ...

January 22, 2013 – 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 ...

What does it mean to be at war with your own flesh within a culture that already hates the black body? And what does this mean for black women, whose bodies are doubly despised?

For some months—since I was told about this award—I have been trying to find the point in my life when this fiction stuff and I became friends. I cannot find it.” ...

The difficulty of representing the past accurately—even if that past is itself a dream, a reconstruction of a reconstruction, a palimpsest of a palimpsest—is one known to people other than writers, of ...

Everybody in the New Wave–nostalgia hotel has their phones out, which makes me pretty much like everybody else. After breezing past the lobby desk, I peek around: slate colors, fresh leather. There ...

When Amia Srinivasan published her essay “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” in the London Review of Books in early 2018, several months into the public discussions surrounding #MeToo, it provoked ...