What a sensible idea of Ashbery’s, I thought, and modest—to direct attention away from himself. It also worked to his own benefit; he was more interested in exploring these other poets and ...

From an anonymous message about Rinaldo Nazzaro, the founder of The Base, a white-supremacist group, that circulated on Telegram in April. Unlike what most people and the media think, The ...

Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...

I recall having breakfast at a hotel in Brussels in 2017 and sitting across from Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the 1991 book that gave my generation a ...

The case against a venerable pregnancy treatmentA fter just a couple of days on bed rest, the material of your body begins to feel different: softer, heavier, a burden to the bone beneath. The thud of ...

To survive you need an edge. One of them seemed to have the name Grimaldi. I’m slipping, Grimaldi said every so often in a breaking-apart voice and the other guy would cross the room and stand close ...

Lonsan had come to Japan from Thailand in 1995, after a chatty recruiter showed up in her village and offered her a job at a restaurant. She was living with her parents, who had no money or property, ...

Discussed in this essay: The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies, by Paul Fischer. Simon and Schuster. 416 pages. $28.99. O n the morning of October 14, ...

I n the eighth grade I hit a kid named Kevin Flowers so hard in the face that he had to travel out of state to get a corrective rhinoplasty. He made a horrible joke. He hadn’t even been talking to me.

Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light (1979) was published in English in 2019, in a superb translation by the late Geraldine Harcourt. Although Harcourt had translated other Tsushima books decades ...

Discussed in this essay: Alice James: A Biography, by Jean Strouse. Picador. 416 pages. $20. Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, by Jean Strouse. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 336 ...