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

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 ...

Our seminal blonde, Lorelei Lee, comes from Little Rock, Arkansas, with a dubious backstory full of intrigue. An archetypal faux-naïf, she uses her perceived naïveté to get the better of the gentlemen ...

Vladimir Sorokin, however, is alive; he is quite alive, and when I asked him how and why (along with a clutch of other ...

Dreams are trash. Dreams are ash. A man from Los Angeles left a small ziplock bag of his ashes to me in his will.” ...

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.

One of Jane Austen’s many mind-bending skills was her ability to wrest so much drama from a world that was, by present-day standards, almost unfathomably static. Austen’s novels are preindustrial time ...

May 12, 2025 – “It turns out that for Ashbery, the big theory was psychoanalysis, the process by which secondhand knowledge becomes firsthand.” ...

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 ...