At that moment we somehow knew that it was the beach where the artist, with a perfect taste for drama, for a great story, for a piercing ray of light, had met his end. His signature might have been ...

The rules of Japan’s national sport are relatively straightforward: two rikishi—literally, “strong men”—face each other near the center of the ring, crouched on their haunches, like plus-size ...

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, by Graham Allison. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 400 pages. $16.99. Red Flags: Why Xi’s China Is in Jeopardy, by George Magnus. Yale ...

Though they already live alone, Vigdis Hjorth’s narrators often feel that they need to be even more alone, to retreat from city life altogether, to a place where there is no risk of running into their ...

From The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy, out in February from Dutton. Leon Trotsky’s whitewashed study, which abutted his simply furnished bedroom, was ...

The speaker of “Danse Russe,” William Carlos Williams’s oft-anthologized poem, gyrates naked before his mirror, singing, “I am lonely, lonely. / I was born to be lonely, / I am best so!” Good for… ...

Becky Zhang: “The Precipice” is set at a private all-girls school in Los Angeles in the Nineties, but is written from the perspective of a woman in the present looking back on that time in her life.

I’m talking about the rupture of a civilizing thread—historic events, like the start of the Civil War at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, and the ...

Last year, Hari Kunzru took a walk around London. Or not quite a walk but a dérive, a French term appropriated by the Situationist International political group that is often translated to mean ...

The only letter I’ve ever sent to the New York Times was in the 1980s, objecting to the paper’s suddenly pestilent use of “draconian.” During Iran–Contra the complaint must have seemed trivial; the ...