From an introduction to the audiobook edition of J. F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, which was released in May by Hachette Audio. Toward the end of…
From comments published online and in media outlets upon the release of a TV commercial for the Italian company Amica Chips. The commercial depicts nuns eating potato chips in a…
From an essay that was scheduled to appear in the Spring 2024 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, Islands. The issue has been on hold since the magazine went on hiatus late…
From a March 1940 letter to her brother, André, collected in A Life in Letters, which will be published next month by Harvard University Press. Translated from the French by…
From The Heart in Winter, which will be published this month by Doubleday. On Wyoming Street in the evening a patent Irish stumbled by, some crazy old meathead in a…
From a manuscript in progress. The best I can do is to be concrete, by which I mean cemented in place. By which I mean being the mean witch I…
From messages seen in a video posted on social media in April by Karam Hassan. The messages were written by Palestinians on the walls of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. Translated…
From Getting to Know Death, which will be published this month by Bloomsbury. I have been close to people who one day found themselves in the desperate place and didn’t…
From letters collected in The Letters of Seamus Heaney, which will be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dear Loving Man, All this is spilling out like a…
From an October 2023 interview with President Biden, conducted by the special counsel Robert Hur and the deputy special counsel Marc Krickbaum, about the storage of classified documents in Biden’s…
From My Body Is Paper, which will be published this month by City Lights. In 1996, Cuadros died of AIDS complications at the age of thirty-four. I had been breathing…
From A Question of Belonging, which was published last month by Archipelago Books. Translated from the Spanish by Anna Vilner. A long time ago, Atilio and I lived in an…
From Sad Planets, which will be published this month by Polity. The first female in space was not, as is commonly thought, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963, but Laika the dog,…
From Long Island, which was published last month by Scribner. When Martin entered, the bar was empty. Jim served him a bottle of Guinness, then went into the stockroom at…
From Facebook posts written by the director Paul Schrader since 2021. an observation about film economics. The post-nickelodeon decision to monetize motion pictures (squeezing large numbers of patrons into unair-conditioned…
From Sleepers Awake, which will be published next year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The murmur of an um and an er, etc., sustains the “apparent present” through “stains in…
Adapted from “The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine,” a paper that was published in February by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. More than two years into Russia’s invasion,…
From descriptions that appear on the websites of former jails that have been converted to hotels. liberty hotel, boston In 1973, prisoners incarcerated in the Charles Street Jail revolted because…
From transcripts of calls made to the Welsh Ambulance Service in 2023. operator: Tell me exactly what’s happened. caller: Yesterday evening, we had some kebab, and I might have…
From Strangers in Light Coats: Selected Poems, 2014–2020, which was published in November by Seagull Books. Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger. I was born into the Christian households…
From The Core of an Onion, which was published in November by Bloomsbury. James Beard once wrote, “I can easily make a whole meal of onion sandwiches, for to me…
From an affidavit filed in 2022 by an FBI agent in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. In November 2023, “J.B.,” the defendant, was sentenced to eighteen…
From God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin, edited by Hilton Als, which was published in March by Dancing Foxes Press and the Brooklyn Museum. I met…
From This Strange Eventful History, which will be published this month by W. W. Norton. He could hear his wife, Barbara, now in the other room, getting ready for his father’s funeral.…
From a civil complaint filed in February against Albuquerque Public Schools, in New Mexico. On the morning of May 2, 2022, a teacher brought two swords with her into her…