Casting Miss World 1994 as the second-prettiest sister would make the metaphysics of their romance totally unrecognizable ...

But Goshen was not an attempt at charity. It was, according to my parents’ interpretation of scripture, a tangible ...

Emma has been called a detective novel, and with good reason: the fun of first reading it consists largely in scrutinizing ...

In December 1903, Thomas Mann wrote his older brother, Heinrich, a long letter reviewing the latter’s novel—with brutal candor. Some of the most scathing bits are below. The complete missive is in The ...

The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience. It was like John ...

My new job came with a research stipend. I’d never had one before—a few grand that would renew each year for five years and then end. What could I use it for? “Anything,” I was told, which seemed ...

As it so happened, I was visiting a college on the East Coast a few years ago to talk about contemporary Italian literature. Right before my lecture, a small group of comparative literature students ...

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Nasser Rabah’s poem “The War Is Over,” translated from the Arabic by Wiam ...

Michelle Tea once described Valencia as “a snapshot, more or less, of my twenty-fifth year on earth, written not how it happened but how I felt it happened.” It feels right, then, in a numerological ...

Montreal/Paris/London/New York/Berlin/Chicago/Seoul/Amsterdam/Mexico City/Tokyo/Vancouver/Los Angeles. In the Day-Glo light of the mid-aughts, that slogan of American ...

“They’re waiting for an autograph from Salman Rushdie,” the man behind me explained. After everything he’s been through. People were gathering behind a barricade at a door of the 92nd Street Y, down ...

Ever since I made the mistake of moving away from New York a couple of summers ago, I haven’t been able to spend more than a day or maybe two in the city or in Brooklyn without thinking of the dancing ...