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 ...

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 ...

Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the premiere of The Crucible. In this interview, Arthur Miller discusses the writing of the play, and the McCarthy hearings that inspired it.

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 ...

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

Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start ...

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 ...

October 1, 2020 – Daniel Mendelsohn on Homer, W. G. Sebald, and the looping, digressive narrative style known as ring composition.

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 ...