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

Really playing a character is about a lot more than whether you have to take your shirt off. Sometimes you do, sometimes you ...

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

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 ...

Daniel Horowitz Brooklyn-based illustrator. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Harvard Business Review, Time Magazine, and BusinessWeek.

Marguerite Duras on her mother, a woman whose lived contradictions rivaled those of the greatest characters in literature.

Marguerite Duras was a French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. Her breakthrough international success came with The Lover ...

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

Vinca is a complex little plant, and periwinkle, named for its blossoms, is an equally complex color. A subset of violet, which is a subset of purple, periwinkle denotes a precise shade that appears ...

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 ...

October 20, 2020 – I’ve been thinking on russet lately, this color of oak and Rembrandt and austerity. Its terra-cotta earthiness fits my mood.

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 ...