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 ...

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 ...

In September 2023, in the middle of the night, England’s most beloved tree was mysteriously felled in a bizarre act of vandalism. The public outcry was swift and furious—this was, after all, by some ...

Brontez Purnell is nothing if not prolific. The author of seven books, most recently Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt: A Memoir in Verse, he’s also a musician, filmmaker, dancer, and choreographer. Purnell ...

The notion of the “nostalgic American” served liberals as an ideal whipping boy at a time when the intellectual foundations of liberalism were beginning to erode. As the dogma of progress became ...

From the book When We Cease to Understand the World. The book, a fictionalized retelling of a series of scientific and mathematical discoveries, was published last month by New York Review Books.

In her many celebrated novels and story collections, Joy Williams tends to confront—with mordant comedy and bluntness and often a kind of ambiguously mystical quality (befitting the child of a ...

Of all the niche communities birthed by the modern internet, “gooners” might be the most alien, and to many, the most repellent. Gooning, writes Daniel Kolitz in the November issue, is “a new kind of ...

Three 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 ...

Franz Kafka was a skinny fellow; he claimed he was the thinnest person he knew. As a young man, he deliberately developed a facial tic. He sometimes felt he didn’t really exist, or if he did, only in ...