Jane Campion’s moral wilderness

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Peter Orner is a true writers’ writer, which is to say a writer writers complain to writers about readers not reading. His novel The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (a…

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A stroll through our cities

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Uncovering Iran’s coup

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The memoir is a tempting but treacherous form. As the English novelist Rachel Cusk writes in Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $20), “Unclothed, truth can be…

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Andrew Solomon’s exploration of difference

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C. S. Lewis once wrote that we must read the classics “to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.” Yet the briefest contact with the…

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Willa Cather’s correspondence

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No and the magic system of advertising

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In 1929, Robert Ripley was receiving nearly 3,000 letters a day. As Neal Thompson writes in A Curious Man: The Strange & Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe it or Not!”…

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The autumnal works of James Salter

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Is Marx still relevant?

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Some of the most interesting minds at work in the American arts today can be found in the video-game industry. Such designers as Jonathan Blow, Jenova Chen, Clint Hocking, Ken…

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P. G. Wodehouse and the costs of innocence

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Adult animation grows up with Archer

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Since Don Quixote, the essential subject of the novel has been geography: what is out there, who lives there, how they are different from characters who live in other landscapes.…

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The Soviet Attempt to Export Communism

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Blavatsky’s cosmic soap opera

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In 70 a.d., a few decades after the crucifixion of Jesus, the Roman army destroyed Jerusalem after a long siege. Perhaps no event has had more enduring reverberations. Judaism lost…

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A history of table technology

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Thornton Wilder's multifaceted life and work

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Ashok Rajamani would like to show you what happens when 100 billion neurons are suddenly overwhelmed by bursting blood vessels. In June 2000, at the age of twenty-five, Rajamani is…

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Fairy tales and the roots of literature

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The democratic fiction of Richard Brautigan

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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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The many voices of Zadie Smith

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A word-of-mouth dictionary

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