Door to Door

Mohsin Hamid’s displaced persons

Master of the Mundane

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s encyclopedic novels

The Raw and the Cooked

By Francine Prose, from Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, published in April by Harper. Prose is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine.

On Women Writers and V. S. Naipaul

I’m still asked surprisingly often about “Scent of a Woman’s Ink,” which Harper’s Magazine published more than a decade ago — an essay in which I tried to understand why…

Lonely island

Mike Leigh's intimate cinema

You Got Eyes

Robert Frank imagines America

Love for Sale

Appraising the relics of a relationship

More Is More

Roberto Bolaño’s magnum opus

Books and Circuses

The politics of literary scapegoating

Berlin stories

The caustic energy of Weimar art

A culture of concealment

The artful warnings of Nadezhda Mandelstam

Invitation to a crucifixion

Fundamentalism goes to Hollywood

Voting Democracy off the Island

Reality TV and the Republican ethos

Revisiting the icons

The intimate photography of Diane Arbus

Unknown master

The fictions of Mavis Gallant

Comfort cult

On the honest unloveliness of William Trevor's world

The coldest eye

Acting badly among the Arabs

The bones of Muzhiks

Isaac Babel gets lost in translation

I know why the caged bird cannot read

How American high school students learn to loathe literature

Scent of a Woman’s Ink

Are women writers really inferior?

The old morgue