The Sick Child by Edvard Munch is undoubtedly a highlight of Norwegian painting, still compelling and touching, still ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A tech company worth trillions is fighting, hard, to transform Pine Island, a town whose Wikipedia page claims just two notable people: Ralph Samuelson, the inventor of waterskiing, and Lucas Helder, ...

An encounter with Emerson’s essays. This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as ...

Everybody in the New Wave–nostalgia hotel has their phones out, which makes me pretty much like everybody else. After breezing past the lobby desk, I peek around: slate colors, fresh leather. There ...

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 ...

Who hasn’t had a boss, supervisor, or mentor worthy of complaint? The first person I worked for, who was white, was in the habit of calling me “weak.” Her boss’s boss, also white, one day gave a ...