A person once said to me, “You’re a writer. You must have a lot to say.” He was making an assumption. I’ve thought about his assumption many times. Is it that simple? Do I write because I have a lot ...

Worms love southwestern Ontario. The region’s dairy farms offer loamy soil, untilled and laden with manure: an annelid’s arcadia. On damp nights, when the wind dies down and the temperature is just so ...

Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, by Alexander Nemerov. Penguin Press. 288 pages. $28. Imagine, if you will, that it’s the year 1990, and you are flipping through the magazine Art ...

Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, by Karl Marx. Edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press. 944 pages. $39.95. Our doomed thought ...

Cymbidium Lowianum, a color lithograph by Joseph Mansell, after a painting by Henry George Moon from Reichenbachia: Orchids Illustrated and Described, Second Series, Vol. 2, Tab 53, c. 1888–94, by ...

I am sitting in a bland conference room in Midtown Manhattan with twenty-nine so-called business professionals, and one of our instructors, Sharon, has just told us to imagine a huge rectangular brass ...

Audition, by Katie Kitamura. Riverhead Books. 208 pages. $28. One third of the way into Katie Kitamura’s 2017 novel, A Separation, its narrator asks an elderly Greek woman to demonstrate a traditional ...

Paul is Lily’s gay best friend and closest romantic confidant. Grating portmanteaus are a crucial part of their relationship. “Dickmatized?” I pronounce the word wrong so she knows I hate it. “That’s ...

From an introduction to the audiobook edition of J. F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, which was released in May by Hachette Audio. T oward the end of the nineteenth century, the ...

Discussed in this essay: Alice James: A Biography, by Jean Strouse. Picador. 416 pages. $20. Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, by Jean Strouse. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 336 ...

Elden Ring, developed by FromSoftware. Bandai Namco. $59.99. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, developed by FromSoftware. Bandai Namco. $39.99. Video games, even when played alone, have to be ...

In the mid-Nineties, I spent about eighteen months working as an editor for the British edition of a new magazine called Wired, which had been founded in San Francisco as a sort of house journal of ...