For several years when I was growing up, my family drove to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In Ashland, the main ...

Just writing what happens, and knowing a lot of it won’t work and that what works will work not because of technique, mainly, ...

The United States is a lyric nation. It has a geography suited to epic, and an expanse suited to epic, but it is organized in ...

From Barbara Pym’s novel The Sweet Dove Died, originally published in 1978 (NYRB Classics): ‘We specialize in porcelain and ...

Door bells,” Barbara Guest said, divorcing the compound with a pause. The poem was simple, startling, one minute long. In the words, I recognized the perfect encapsulation of a thought I hadn’t known ...

Sharon Olds published her first book, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven. The book is organized into four sections, “Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother,” and “Journey,” and it begins with its ...

I think buying a wrap in a pharmacy is incredible. I once bought a huge wrap in a Walgreens in Manhattan. It came with a sachet of extra mayonnaise tucked into the packaging even though it was already ...

On a stretch of rural road not far from my house, there is a small wood where, once a year, for just a few short and cold days, the ground turns a magnificent shade of purple. In a reversal of ...

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 ...

I don’t find myself investing much in the kingdom of heaven. It has always been this way for me, even as a child. I prayed often, sometimes the requisite five times a day in my Muslim household. But I ...

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 ...

I wrote this lecture in August 2023 and delivered it at Columbia University at the end of September. Nine days later, on October 7, the military wing of Hamas, the organization in power in the Gaza ...