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) ...

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.” ...

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 ...

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 ...

February 19, 2015 – 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 ...

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 ...

William Faulkner’s drawings from his Ole Miss days are wonderfully Deco. Random House UK launches The Happy Foodie, described thusly: “Bringing cookery books to life, helping you get happy in the ...

I am partial to sentences with this framework: “There are two kinds of [ ]: those who [ ], and those who [ ].” The setup should, ideally, involve a chiasmus or double entendre or any florid rhetorical ...

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 ...