William Dean Howells called it his “Uneasy Chair.” Lewis H. Lapham thought it “a column always grotesquely misnamed.” Bernard DeVoto simply wanted to do something else—a books section—and tried to fob ...

William Dean Howells called it his “Uneasy Chair.” Lewis H. Lapham thought it “a column always grotesquely misnamed.” Bernard DeVoto simply wanted to do something else—a books section—and tried to fob ...

Syria’s communications blackout, North Korea’s unicorn lair, and Iceland’s ram-penis economy ...

I just wanted to tap. But in the mid-Eighties and early Nineties, in the well-to-do suburbs of New Jersey, the price of flapping, winging, and shuffling off to Buffalo was… ...

Shia LaBeouf and I were born six days apart in June 1986. I see him as the representative of my nanodemographic—as if my week’s cohort of white American males emerged from a brief huddle to announce, ...

From “Dream Geographies,” an essay about the writing of her novel Praiseworthy that was published in September in the literary journal HEAT. The notebooks show their age through their use and how they ...

From Wildcat Dome, which will be published in March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda. She gets off the bus and walks for about twenty meters along the ...

William Dean Howells called it his “Uneasy Chair.” Lewis H. Lapham thought it “a column always grotesquely misnamed.” Bernard DeVoto simply wanted to do something else—a books section—and tried to fob ...

From a series of 144-word essays on Untitled Thought Project, Lacey’s Substack newsletter. This entry was published in October. I’ve been doing paperwork in Mexico City, signing thing after thing.

From 9-1-1 calls made in September by Patricia Upton, a resident of Kitsap County, Washington. operator: 9-1-1, what are you reporting? patricia upton: Yes, I need a officer to come out to my property ...

How to explain to her daughter. Back when she was in college, she had taken a literary seminar for which she’d had to read Kafka’s “Letter to His Father.” After the class had discussed it, the teacher ...

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