On Jacques Tati

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Members of the Moorish Science Temple of America at an annual gathering, 1928 Courtesy Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library Last summer, Philadelphia proclaimed…

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On the long shadow of Maoism

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The cold, frenzied genius of Kleist

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The first history of the most remote ocean

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Design for a grotesque mask by Johann Ulrich Stapf © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Witch hunts have always been a tool of those in power. As such, they shed…

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The life of Robert Stone

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There’s much to be said for being maladjusted. More and more, perhaps, as the environment to which one is expected to adjust becomes more ruinous. The climate activist Greta Thunberg…

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The end of a literary marriage

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On the specious new history podcasts

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On the fiction of Juan Carlos Onetti

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On the queen of old Hollywood’s émigrés

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Discussed in this essay: Cleanness, by Garth Greenwell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 240 pages. $26. Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, by Vincent Brown. Harvard University Press. 336 pages. $35.  Of…

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  Questions about the future of Islam in Europe tend to revolve around “Europeans,” reflexively imagined as native-born and white. If reactionary nationalists fear the influence of an “alien” culture,…

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Thomas Chatterton Williams loses his race

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A gothic life of Frank Lloyd Wright

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On the morning of my friend’s funeral, my period arrived two weeks early and with a sudden force that ruined the black clothing I’d brought and the rickety chair I…

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The gospel according to John (and Karen)

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America’s new poetry of place

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There are no men in the densely civilized galaxy of Samuel R. Delany’s 1984 novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Everybody—whether human or extraterrestrial, and on all but…

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Ben Lerner changes perspective

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On Henrik Ibsen

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“Not a great writer, though a pleasant one” was Vladimir Nabokov’s verdict on Ivan Turgenev, the first Russian novelist to make an impact abroad. Nabokov—­who once complained about Henry James’s…

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Sex, violence, and the crime that defined modern Italy

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Should we miss Richard Holbrooke?

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In the lofty Polish hamlet of Luftzug, the skies are low, the winters harsh, and the cell signal perpetually uncertain of its nationality. The highlight of the social calendar is…

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Rediscovering a forgotten Chicago writer

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On the comforts of Simenon’s famed detective

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