Inside the world of Louise BourgeoisW riting when I am in pain feels painful and is the opposite of what I want and am able to do. When I am in pain I find it impossible to take hold of the pen. My ...

Discussed in this essay: Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen. Liveright. 576 pages. $40. I n the 1630s, the powerful Pequot Confederacy of southern New ...

F lash forward to the present day, as the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, “content.” As recently as fifteen years ago ...

T hree springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...

O ne night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact ...

What a sensible idea of Ashbery’s, I thought, and modest—to direct attention away from himself. It also worked to his own benefit; he was more interested in exploring these other poets and ...

One of five kids, Crumb was born in 1943 to Chuck, an enlisted Marine, and Bea, a diner waitress. In the span of a few years, Chuck’s posts took the family from Pennsylvania to Iowa to California, ...

Katie Kitamura’s anti-expressive fictionDiscussed in this essay: Audition, by Katie Kitamura. Riverhead Books. 208 pages. $28. O ne third of the way into Katie Kitamura’s 2017 novel, A Separation, its ...

What happens when we talk to animals?W hen the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a ...

Trump’s second attempt at dismantling the bureaucracyF ive months after Donald Trump moved into the White House in 2017, a reporter asked Vladimir Putin about the allegations that Russia had ...

O nce, on a river-rafting trip through the Grand Canyon, I traveled with a charming, good-humored man who happened to run an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He liked to rail against Nancy Pelosi, who ...

W e will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in ...