Holidays, in themselves, are no longer interesting and I’ve no desire to hear any more about them. To quote Mrs. Quill, from Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies—there was famously only ever one novel and ...

Los Angeles is not “Hollywood,” and those who confuse the two should be banned from visiting. One quarter of California’s forty million residents live in L.A., which is the most populous county in the ...

EXT. 8TH STREET—LATE AFTERNOON (C. 1959). CAMERA IN NONSTOP MOTION is on the shoulder of a young man, late teens, intently walking west on a busy Greenwich Village thoroughfare. Under one arm, he’s ...

I’m scrolling through terrible images on the internet the way James Baldwin describes browsing on a television some mornings before getting out of bed, switching from channel to channel restlessly, ...

Discussed in this essay: The Deserters, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New Directions. 192 pages. $16.95. If The Deserters poses this question in a dramatic way, the relationship ...

From “Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” which appeared in the July 1865 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The simple habits of Mr. Lincoln were so well known that it is a subject for surprise that ...

The corpse flower, when it opens every few years, attracts admirers by the tens of thousands. It is only in bloom for two or three days, and for those days it stinks. People stand in line to savor its ...

Audition, by Katie Kitamura. Riverhead Books. 208 pages. $28. One third of the way into Katie Kitamura’s 2017 novel, A Separation, its narrator asks an elderly Greek woman to demonstrate a traditional ...

How to explain to her daughter. Back when she was in college, she had taken a literary seminar for which she’d had to read Kafka’s “Letter to His Father.” After the class had discussed it, the teacher ...

That summer we lived in two houses, one after the other. I had remembered it as two summers, but my brother, Gabriel, reminded me, no, it was all one summer, 1961, when he turned six and I turned ...

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, by Northrop Frye. Princeton University Press. 408 pages. $22.95. The New Science, by Giambattista Vico. Translated from the Italian by Jason Taylor and Robert C.

Something about poetry—writing it, reading it, writing about reading it—begs to be postponed indefinitely. I don’t mean that I dread it, only that it calls for conditions that never quite arise. My ...