From the political philosopher Rahel Jaeggi’s Progress and Regression, translated from the German by Robert Savage (Harvard ...

Little Reunions ought to be burned,’ Eileen Chang wrote to her friend and literary executor, Stephen Soong, in 1976, the year ...

It’s much harder to work in an active shooter and have it mean anything, because an active shooter is by definition a ...

October 26, 2012 – “TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”Daniel Horowitz takes on Poe’s classic 1843 tale of ...

May 15, 2013 – Via the 92nd Street Y, the only known recorded performance of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, which Thomas premiered at the Y in 1953.

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 ...

“Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Be better than yourself.” Dean Faulkner Wells, who has put down here William Faulkner’s ghost story “The Werewolf” as he told ...

Freud is right to associate fainting and death. Fainting is some kind of pantomime of dying. You abscond, momentarily, from the world.

A few months ago, as a result of the strange, hazy possession that occurs while sitting in front of the laptop screen, I ...

The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the most exciting novels ever written and on the other hand is one of the most badly written novels of all time and in any literature. The book is full of holes.

I began writing this essay while putting off writing another one. My apartment is full of books I haven’t read, and others I read so long ago that I barely remember what’s in them. When I’m writing ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...