In the latter half of my student days I chose for myself three Arab friends: a Palestinian, a Sudanese, and the third was a ...

December 8, 2025 – “On the historic day when he finally reaches Lhasa, his journal entry begins: 'Our first care was to ...

Monsieur Baba appeared out of a dusty white Toyota, which he was maneuvering with one hand. He was dressed in used dusty blue ...

New books by Joe Brainard, Peter Handke, Tarpley Hitt, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, Christian Schlegel, and Olga Tokarczuk.

Happy endings are just about a question of the place where you choose to stop the story. In a life, there’s lots of moments ...

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 ...

La Chanson de Roland is one of the major epic poems of the Middle Ages. It centers around one of Charlemagne’s adjutants, a prefect named Roland. Though billed as a “song,” it is a blood-soaked screed ...

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 ...

Never in my life have I managed to be unhappy when there was a pool around. I’m a Scorpio, a water sign. It’s a miracle I’ve ...

Ambrose Bierce’s old house in St. Helena, California, surrounded by the vineyards of Napa Valley, is in good repair. Eight stout sequoia trunks flare outward from a fused base in the front yard. An ...

In 1910, a mouse named Ignatz first beaned Krazy Kat with a brick. The plot of this comic strip, centered on a “heppy go lucky kat,” is simple. Krazy Kat loves Ignatz Mouse. Officer Pup loves Krazy ...