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“MR. BLOOM READ with relish the lustrous verses of Blake and Shelley,” I am tempted to write, since Harold Bloom, the author of... Read More

In the early 1980s, an adolescent Eduardo Halfon, then living in Florida with his parents after fleeing the violence of the Guatemalan Civil... Read More

The first time he sees it, a chord is struck inside him. He is overcome by a kind of excitement he has no words for. Read More

If you tell people, “Annie Dillard has died,” most of them will say, “I don’t know who that is.” And... Read More

A flurry of researchers had issued warnings, but Donald Trump was not to be moved. The idea that advanced AI could escape human control, the... Read More

The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt is the brilliant, edifying new exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. I... Read More

In 2012, literature scholar Nicholas Dames identified a group of writers—among them Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan,... Read More

I am at the airport gate waiting to depart, watching passengers hurry past with rolling suitcases and paper cups of coffee. A small boy sits... Read More

Ancient Egyptians believed that the sun was a golden barge piloted by the god Ra. Each day, he traversed the twelve regions of the daylight... Read More

The artist Jake Longstreth paints landscapes of America, often the West and Southwest, with their distinctive vegetation, deserts, and... Read More

Yesterday, Naomi Kanaka wrote a thing about my first book, The Aesthetics of Degradation. I’m flattered – you have to be... Read More

Midwestern Death Trip opens with quotes collected in Wisconsin Death Trip. Pulled from the local papers in Black River Falls, Wisconsin,... Read More

As Far As You Know, published in the spring of the pandemic year 2020, was A.F. Moritz’s first collection of poems since The Sparrow... Read More

I was a bop kid from the start. When Eric Carmen, the talented lead singer of the Raspberries, wrote “I’m a rocker, I’m a... Read More

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the “monster” begins as a creature whose maker abdicates his catechetical responsibility.... Read More

Anglophone poets are accustomed to enjoying an essentially uncomplicated and blameless relationship with their language. Every tongue is a... Read More

We all help our kids follow their dreams—when they’re not far-fetched. So what was I to do with a son who throws baseball’s... Read More

One of the many splendid things about Zach Cregger’s “Weapons” is that it was a horror film made with humanity. It... Read More

Like many Millennial men, I used to be pretty invested in Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West—primarily because of his music,... Read More

I have Wi-Fi. I have a human heart. Of course I fired up the 60-second spot for Novig, a sports betting company. I was drawn not by the... Read More

Over the past year, the AI community has become increasingly worried over the behavior of autonomous agents. Over the past week, that worry... Read More

Few cartoon characters occupy as central a place in the American imagination as the Looney Tunes. Created by Warner Bros. in 1930 as a... Read More

Carole Maso’s Ava delivers through a nonlinear succession of sparse details, the bodily experience of losing the ability to make... Read More

I’ve been hoping not to write this essay. In fact, I’ve been hoping for about half a decade not to write this essay. It went... Read More

Men read less fiction than women. Exactly how much less is subject to debate, but conservative estimates find a roughly 20-percent gap... Read More

In this strand of the multiverse, the I that is me is not entirely sure what happens in Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Exit... Read More

Notes on a Colonial Situation in Hell opens with a crime. Mr. Bagshaw, a Methodist missionary who runs a church plantation at Gilgal, on the... Read More

First of all, I’m thankful to James Elkins for his response; I’m a fan of his work and his reply is generously attentive. And... Read More

Emily St. John Mandel’s brilliant new novel “Exit Party” begins five years in the future at a party in L.A.’s Echo... Read More

Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M, is essentially plotless. It bears an ambivalent, sometimes winking, relationship to character. It... Read More

Dad hates his job so much there’s days he looks afraid, finishing dinner with the family in front of the TV at 6 pm and then turning in... Read More

If The Sopranos has been a success since its first appearance on television, the aspects that have resonated with audiences have changed.... Read More