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In the harsh winter of 1895, Tolstoy wrote a story called “Master and Man,” which tells of a merchant named Brekhunov who, on a day that threatens a blizzard, orders…

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In the year since Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature, translations of his works have glutted the shelves. Part of this influx has to do with the general…

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Before Europe orientalized its eastern colonies, the Jew orientalized himself. Living in exile — amid the empires of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, and the four Islamic caliphates — he…

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You never step in the same river twice, but a rival you step on constantly. “Everything flows” — including anger and resentment. According to Socrates, according to Plato, the original…

From the Palo Alto Sessions

By Joshua Cohen, from Book of Numbers, out next month from Random House. Cohen is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. Toward the end D-Unit had been working on the…

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Toni Morrison’s novels — a formidable shelf of eleven by now, as the author settles in to her mid-eighties — have all been catholicons, correctives to the canon. That strong, sensuous diction —…

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A novel character emerged from the mists of Second Empire France and roamed the boulevards of Romanticism. This man was Baudelaire’s flâneur, but that’s not all he was. In depressing…

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Most Americans are familiar with the 1787 compromise that sought to bring North-South equality to Congressional representation by counting slaves as three fifths of a person, or three fifths of…

Growing Up

Five coming-of-age stories

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Cyberspace” is where old footage — and old ignorant prejudice — lives forever. The term made its fictional debut in a monologue by the disgraced hacker hero of William Gibson’s…

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The horseman among myrtles, the four horns and four carpenters, the measuring line, the candlestick and two olive trees, the flying scroll, the women and the ephah, the four chariots:…

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First, collect all the details you can on all the people you encounter — this will turn them into “characters.” Second, search this trove for the most interesting connections among the…

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John Florio — lexicographer, raconteur, and supposed model for Shakespeare’s schoolmaster Holofernes, in Love’s Labour’s Lost — was born in London in 1553 to an unidentified Englishwoman and an Italian Protestant who’d…

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Bernard Malamud was born in New York City in 1914 to a family that exchanged Yiddish for English, and he always regretted the loss. Older than Bellow and, in Roth…

First Family, Second Life

Thomas Pynchon goes online

Case Study (c. 1904)

By Joshua Cohen, from Attention! A (Short) History, published this month in the United Kingdom by Notting Hill Editions. Cohen, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author, most…

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The Gregorian, Julian, Coptic, Buddhist, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Tibetan, Zoroastrian, and Mesoamerican calendars—and the Mayan, which predicts that the world will end just days after this issue reaches your hands—all…

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Tom Wolfe is back with Back to Blood (Little, Brown and Company, $30) and I have to confess, after wading through this multiculti, multilingual, punnyfunny Miami miasma, that it’s difficult…

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To historians, the world has always imagined its own demise; to critics, the end of the world is imminent. Meanwhile, my generation demands to read both apocalypses instantly and for…

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The College Borough

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Speakeasy

A Czech’s boozy refuge from writer’s bloc

Call it Sleek

The gentrification of Henry Roth

Lines of Occupation

The post-Zionist poetics of Yitzhak Laor

Last Man Standing

The acquisitive music of John Zorn

Purist of the Self

Did Mahler get the biographer he deserves?