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

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 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 ...

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 ...

On a stretch of rural road not far from my house, there is a small wood where, once a year, for just a few short and cold days, the ground turns a magnificent shade of purple. In a reversal of ...

This book was written in the Rochester, New York, offices of Radian Corporation between 1989 and 1996, at a computer strategically located to maximize the number of steps a curious person (a boss, for ...

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 ...