As one who was identified in the 1960s with the popularization of a literary genre known best as the New Journalism—an innovation of uncertain origin that appeared prominently in Esquire, Harper’s,… | Continue reading
Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick a… | Continue reading
In a diary entry dated 1911, Kafka writes that having a day job “is a horrible double life from which there is probably no escape but insanity.” Academia and publishing offer literature-adjacent ca… | Continue reading
It seems blindingly obvious that happiness should be a core aim of life. Even governments are increasingly seeing it as part of their role. Following the lead of Bhutan, France and the UK attempted… | Continue reading
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She aimed to challenge one of her state’s separate-but-equal policies. City rules required that Black bus passengers exit … | Continue reading
If your writing grows popular enough, sparking feelings in the hearts of admirers is an occupational hazard—and so is having to turn those admirers down. So Walt Whitman did to Anne Gilchrist, a wr… | Continue reading
The World Series is here. Even though it’s the (ugh) Braves vs. the (ugh) Astros, it’s still time to put on a ballcap, break out of a box of Cracker Jack, and head on out to the old ballgame… or le… | Continue reading
When Edgar Allan Poe was 17 years old, he and John Allan loaded up the family station wagon with all his clothes, posters, and books, and made the 70-mile trek west to Charlottesville, Virginia. Am… | Continue reading
On the occasion of its 170th publication anniversary, here are the very first reviews of Herman Melville’s leviathan-sized opus of obsession, revenge, and meticulously detailed whaling practi… | Continue reading
First things first. What makes a book cover iconic? There are no hard and fast rules, of course—like anything else, you know it when you see it. But in order to compile this list, I looked for reco… | Continue reading
“If creativity is about power to create something from nothing, then believing in impossible things is its most critical component.” –Oli Mould, Against Creativity * I’ll invite you to read this sl… | Continue reading
The following essay appears in the Autumn 2016 issue of The Southern Review. A hog and a man stood in the back room of a London tavern. “Take us across,” the hog said. “We’ll give you meat. … | Continue reading
I was calling on a la la la status thanks to disco number after the garage installed it is now. Pissant! A suitcase on made you down for dairy pro so be there no child lyrics and you crazy is it go… | Continue reading
I moved to Karachi in the aftermath of riots, arriving to smashed shop windows and the smell of burning tires. It was 2012 and the city had been engulfed by protests against a YouTube video that ma… | Continue reading
Sally Rooney is unhappy. Sally Rooney has everything and Sally Rooney is unhappy. Sally Rooney is unhappy because Sally Rooney has everything. If literary careers are like games, and they are, then… | Continue reading
I’ve been playing Monopoly with J every evening for a week and I haven’t won a single game. J plays with abandon, buys indiscriminately, and wins repeatedly. Tonight he’s thrown a suspicious number… | Continue reading
When I look back at those early pandemic months, and even more recent ones, I feel a disconnect between how they appear online—walks outside! a cute tie-dye mask! my dog!—and what they felt like—un… | Continue reading
A code, or cipher, is a method for converting a message in ordinary language, the plaintext, into a ciphertext that looks like gibberish. The conversion generally relies on a key—a vital item of in… | Continue reading
Bertha Benz’s road trip in 1888 had been witnessed by bemused onlookers numbering a few dozen at most. Huge crowds turned out to see the grand car races of the 1890s. By the turn of the century, do… | Continue reading
Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. –Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” 1861 * Charles Darwin was an introvert. Granted, he spent alm… | Continue reading
On November 15th, 1930, leading Italian Futurists sat down to a 12-course dinner at Milan’s Penna D’Oca restaurant that brought about an alarming epiphany: Italy was in need of a culinary renewal, … | Continue reading
Hate: intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury. (Merriam Webster) Hate speech: any kind of communication in speech, writing, or behavior that attacks or … | Continue reading
At the start of Cosmos Episode Nine, just after uttering the immortal phrase that inspired my latest book, Carl Sagan gets up from his seat at the head of the grand table, and picking up a knife po… | Continue reading
Photo ©SHINCHOSHA Lately, Haruki Murakami doesn’t give many interviews. But in 2017, he made an exception for the novelist Mieko Kawakami, whose work he admires, and who has written of the in… | Continue reading
Some words seem to only have a grumpy, negative version. A person can be uncouth, unkempt and ruthless, but why can’t they be the opposite? In fact, at one time they could be. Some of these unpaire… | Continue reading
Some words seem to only have a grumpy, negative version. A person can be uncouth, unkempt and ruthless, but why can’t they be the opposite? In fact, at one time they could be. Some of these unpaire… | Continue reading
Recently, while moving several piles of books (31 titles) from the floor to another place on the floor to make space for my office chair, I experienced a moment of clarity during which I felt like … | Continue reading
It was an unseasonably cool day in August 1949 when a local construction firm picked up the Sigma Phi Epsilon house at 2395 Piedmont Avenue in Berkeley, California, and put it down less than half a… | Continue reading
Just the other day, feeling a ripple of melancholy after cleaning out desk drawers and stacking books into orange moving crates, I wandered into the office next to mine. After 90 years in a micro-p… | Continue reading
“Tell your fucking hitting coach I’m gonna kick his fucking ass!” Yankees coach Phil Nevin screamed at Astros third baseman Alex Bregman. It was not long after the Houston Astros … | Continue reading
Prolific author, radio DJ, and T-shirt designer Haruki Murakami has a reputation for being somewhat reclusive—but that doesn’t mean he’s managed to avoid controversy entirely. Though he’s been prai… | Continue reading
A Bowl of Rotting Peaches Before getting into the science, let me share a personal experience of the sort that may give one pause before concluding, as I suspect most do, that insects are incapable… | Continue reading
Raymond Carver was born 83 years ago, in Clatskanie, Oregon. Later, he would cement his position as one of America’s greatest and most beloved writers and poets, a true master of the short st… | Continue reading
The words people use to describe colors are just as important as the wavelength of light or the physiology of the retina. The way we talk about color is as critical to its manufacture as how we phy… | Continue reading
In 1701, Copenhagen was a burgeoning city fortress of 60,000, a seaside capital enclosed by canals and high walls with just four gates. The streets were narrow and crowded, lined on each side by cr… | Continue reading
Here is what we know. She was born in Japan in 1949. After graduating high school, she moved to Tokyo, where she worked as a bar hostess. She appeared in a few “pink films”—an arty subgenre of sexp… | Continue reading
“Public” is a word that has, in the last decade, become bound tightly to data. Loosely defined, any data that is available in the public domain falls into this category, but the term is most often … | Continue reading
Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. –Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” 1861 * Charles Darwin was an introvert. Granted, he spent alm… | Continue reading
Milman Parry was arguably the most important American classical scholar of the 20th century, by one reckoning “the Darwin of Homeric Studies.” At age 26, this young man from California stepped into… | Continue reading
Producing new manuscripts of Cicero’s writings in the middle of the 15th century was clearly a more laborious and involved enterprise than combing the sleepy shelves of Franciscan libraries for neg… | Continue reading
For some, home is the house they grew up in. For others, it’s a country or a nation. Some find it in family, or in the arms of a lover, while others believe it’s where we go when we die. Some say h… | Continue reading
In 2010, the novelist Philip Hensher complained that half of that year’s Man Booker nominees were novels written in the present tense. He insulted the choice, dismissing it as only fashionable. Hen… | Continue reading
Much of our uncertainty over what alien intelligence will be like arises from our uncertainty about the nature of intelligence on Earth. With regards to this, scientists have suggested at least two… | Continue reading
During the first month of the pandemic I was afraid to write to my grandpa. I imagined the virus, bright pink but invisible, smearing the paper and the envelope and the mail carrier’s glove, and so… | Continue reading
I was feeling—what’s the word where you used to be human but now your soul is a husk of hearts and likes and Zooms and only marginally funny tweets about Ted Cruz? I was feeling that. Maybe y… | Continue reading
Mr. Ramsay of To the Lighthouse has long been one of the most disliked characters in Virginia Woolf’s fiction. The frustrated philosopher and father of eight is rigid, punishing, and always seeking… | Continue reading
I’d guess most people remember reading Lolita for the first time. I do. Freshman fall in college. It was 1989 and I had just turned 18. I curled up under my Laura Ashley knockoff floral comforter a… | Continue reading
Today’s unsurprising-but-still-depressing publishing news: Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has been accused of sexual harassment by five women, reportedly received “at least low- to mid-seven fi… | Continue reading