I’ve given the Second World War a uniformly bad press, rejecting all attempts to depict it as a sensible proceeding or to mitigate its cruelty and swinishness. I have rubbed…
One morning in September, a dapper Frenchman seated next to me in the garden of the Château de Tocqueville gestured solemnly at the front page of Le Monde, the house…
grief and time Grief takes as long as it wants, in various formations, and doesn’t follow rules the way we’d like to think it does. And for God’s sake, it…
From a speech published in the book El arte de la distorsión. Vásquez is the author, most recently, of the story collection Songs for the Flames. Translated from the Spanish.…
From a conversation about Afghanistan between the Iranian writers Salar Abdoh and Mohammad Hossein Jafarian, which was published in September by Guernica. salar abdoh: Do you think that America was…
From Trapped in the Present Tense, which will be published next month by Counterpoint Press. It’s possible to construct a statistical mosaic of American life out of the 332 million…
From a conversation between Olaf Scholz and two eleven-year-olds, Pauline and Romeo, who were interviewing candidates for chancellor of Germany. The exchange aired in September on Late Night Berlin. Scholz…
From an essay that appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of The Threepenny Review. Yesterday, while on extended hold with an appliance store, I deleted dead people from my Contacts.…
From Fight Night, a novel, which was published in October by Bloomsbury. Almost every day Grandma gets a call about someone she knows being dead. You can tell because she…
From prompts in 642 Things to Write About, a book distributed to seniors at Hudson High School in Hudson, Ohio. In September, after parents complained that the book asked students…
From the 2021 Red Suit Survey, which polled hundreds of professional Santas in the United States. What made you decide to be a Santa? I had the look I had…
By an artist and inmate on death row at San Quentin State Prison in California. Spencer created this replica of his cell out of card stock and sold it on…
We have perhaps created too much history too quickly—more than we can cope with. We know the cycles: birth, growth, glory, degeneration. Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first…
After New York City experienced record rainfall this summer, my basement flooded. Water destroyed boxes of books and manuscripts, sitting several inches deep in a plastic crate full of photographs.…