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1.Did you always want to be a writer? I didn’t seriously consider what I wanted to be until I was maybe 14 and then, yes I wanted to be... Read More

Before Cormac McCarthy became Cormac McCarthy, the man and the novelist, he was Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr., or Charlie McCarthy for short. Read More

One of historians’ favorite parlor games is to debate when the French Revolution — or the Russian, Mexican or Haitian — can... Read More

The antidote to oversharing has arrived. Vagueposting is anything I want to hear, oversharing is anything I don’t want to hear. For... Read More

No one reads a Lionel Shriver novel expecting a cheerful ending, and her latest, A Better Life, will not disillusion readers in this respect.... Read More

In certain shops in Chicago, you will find a bumper sticker reading, “Too Dumb for New York, Too Ugly for LA.” While grimly... Read More

Movies these days tend to overexplain themselves, telling viewers how to feel while flattening characters into lazy, uncomplicated... Read More

When did reality start to outstrip fiction for good? Philip Roth believed it was all happening around 1961. “The American writer in the... Read More

For five centuries the Western Hemisphere has been contested by successive imperial orders. Iberian dominance gave way in the eighteenth... Read More

Greetings, Pilgrims, It has been an unusually snowy and cold February in New York City, and I’ve taken lots of pictures. So I thought... Read More

“To inherit or not to inherit, that is the question” for a woman who wants to make art, “as Virginia Woolf also... Read More

Frederick Douglass was the most searing critic of American slavery.  Read More

From T.J. Clark’s If These Apples Should Fall: “The orchard in Garden of Maubuisson’s foreground lay... Read More

Jason was absorbed in a game on his phone, so I asked his mom, “how long has Jason had this stomach ache?” Mom responded,... Read More

Paul Burrell was a footman to Queen Elizabeth II from 1976 to 1987, and then an eyewitness to the marriage of Prince Charles, who is now King... Read More

There’s an unspoken rule that if you write a novel about Nazis, the point can’t simply be “the Nazis were evil” or... Read More

On a recent visit to Atlanta, my sister and I took a walk along the city’s Beltline, the project that represents the crowning... Read More

This week I’m not venturing far, so I’ll write about the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or MASS MoCA, a little... Read More

David Foster Wallace’s famously long novel, Infinite Jest, turned 30 this month, and an old specter came back with the... Read More

When Michel Houellebecq turns seventy this Thursday 26th February, the occasion marks far more than a biographical milestone, as it also... Read More

I’m going to start this essay on sportswriting in what might seem an unusual place, not in a stadium, ballpark, or arena, but at the... Read More

I spent the summer of 2004 working at a food establishment that sold “subs, wings ‘n’ things.” My employment was a... Read More

Parents are often relieved when their child who has trouble reading is finally diagnosed with dyslexia. At last, the problem has a name and... Read More

The modern world can seem disenchanted and meaningless. Tempting, then, to find mystery in the fact we experience anything at all. A new book... Read More

The future was supposed to have arrived this year in a cluster of counties just east of Atlanta in the form of a state-of-the-art factory... Read More

In February 2019, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri promised that the platform would ban any graphic content depicting self-harm. “It... Read More

There are so many digital platforms through which we interact these days that it’s hardly surprising that we’ve nearly forgotten... Read More

Ignatius J. Reilly, the antihero of John Kennedy Toole’s posthumous comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces, is usually remembered for... Read More