If you’re deprived of a home, deprived of access to your family, you learn that, actually, being bound to others is the ...

A tech company worth trillions is fighting, hard, to transform Pine Island, a town whose Wikipedia page claims just two ...

Our bathtub was born in a sturdier, more brutal age. It’s a deep and oblong cauldron—perfect for cooking a human being—which stands in the center of our kitchen. Perched between the cheapo stove and ...

Flannery O’Connor’s favorite meal at the Sanford House restaurant in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lunched regularly with her mother, was fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie. O ’ Connor, after ...

In 1934, Columbia University moved its twenty-two miles of books to the newly built Butler Library. By means of a really long slide. Which actually looks less fun than it sounds, and was much too ...

I am partial to sentences with this framework: “There are two kinds of [ ]: those who [ ], and those who [ ].” The setup should, ideally, involve a chiasmus or double entendre or any florid rhetorical ...

February 19, 2015 – André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t ...

January 22, 2013 – Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the premiere of The Crucible. In this interview, Arthur Miller discusses the writing of the play, and the McCarthy ...

Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, here. In an agrarian or preindustrial Britain, a brilliant young man bristles at his ...

Where to begin? I am sitting at a desk, looking at a first edition of Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild, and looking out the window at San Francisco Bay. San Francisco Bay is the largest estuary ...

At a little more than fifty pages, “The Displaced Person” is one of Flannery O’Connor’s least anthologized stories—and if you share her beliefs about what she called “topical” stories, it’s also one ...

Anne Carson and I met on Zoom last October, in the brick-red sitting room of her apartment in Reykjavik, the city where she and her husband, Robert Currie, have spent time each year since 2008. A ...