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

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

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

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 ...

My problems started much earlier than the night before deadline—they started in my childhood, when I completely failed to learn Russian, and though an inability to function in a writer’s original ...

Everybody likes ghazals. Or they do when they learn what they are: A ghazal is a poetic form originating in and strongly associated with the Islamic cultural sphere. It is a medieval thing—or what ...

Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, was originally called “A Happening.” There would have been something of a joke to this discarded title; from one point of view, nothing much happens in the book.

In 1929, after a nine-year silence, Fernando Pessoa renewed his correspondence with Ophelia Queiroz, with whom he had enjoyed the only romance of his life. Where his earlier letters, from 1920, found ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...

The World’s Largest Ball of Twine (Cawker City, Kansas), the Rare Fur-Bearing Trout (South Otselic, New York), and the Coon Dog Cemetery (Cherokee, Alabama) are still as fresh in my mind as crisp ...

Last night I had that dream again, the one about being shot in the face at close range and my mouth flying off down some white corridor, and I’m so angry with myself for not getting out of the way in ...