By Bohumil Hrabal, from Harlequin’s Millions, published last month by Archipelago Books. Hrabal (1914–1997) was the author of many novels, including I Served the King of England and Too Loud…

Read more

From terms of address in The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, edited by Katherine Bucknell, published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Isherwood met Bachardy,…

Read more

By Jill Bialosky, from the Spring 2014 issue of The Kenyon Review. Bialosky’s fourth poetry collection, The Players, will be published next year by Knopf.

Read more

Read more

By Howard W. French, from China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa, published this month by Knopf. French is a former New York…

Read more

From a February 1952 letter sent by the film and theater director Elia Kazan to Darryl F. Zanuck, head of production at Twentieth Century-Fox. Zanuck rejected the proposal, calling it “original…

Read more

From approximately 150 interviews with current and former employees of the Food and Drug Administration collected as part of an oral-history project begun in the 1970s. Recordings of the interviews…

Read more

From transcripts of conversations on September 17, 2011, recorded by FBI informant Joe Sims, among members of a Georgia militia arrested the following month on various charges. Dan Roberts was sentenced…

Read more

From an April 7, 2012, letter by Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK-47 assault rifle, to Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Kalashnikov died in December 2013; the letter…

Read more

By Luciana Castellina, from Discovery of the World: A Political Awakening in the Shadow of Mussolini, out this month from Verso Books. Translated from the Italian by Patrick Camiller.

Read more

From a new translation of Herodotus’ The Histories, by Tom Holland, out this month from Viking.

Read more

By Ralph Nader, from Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, published last month by Nation Books.

Read more

From a report by the Inspector General of the Air Force on allegations against Major General Stephen D. Schmidt, who retired in January after his behavior toward subordinates was found to…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

From a letter by Agafya Lykova, a seventy-year-old hermit living in the Siberian province of Khakassia, to Vladimir Pavlovsky, editor in chief of the Krasnoyarsk Worker newspaper, which published the…

Read more

By Muriel Spark, from The Informed Air, a collection of essays to be published this month by New Directions. This essay originally appeared in the Observer, as “Eyes and Noses,”…

Read more

By Colin Richmond, from “Deliberation and Precipitation: Fresh Eggs, c. 1890–c. 1910,” published in the Winter 2014 issue of Common Knowledge. Richmond is professor emeritus of medieval history at the…

Read more

From Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy,

Read more

From a note sent in 1917 to the Appeal Tribunal in Middlesex, England, which reviewed requests for exemption from military service during World War I. The note is included in…

Read more

From the 500 least popular lectures out of the more than 1,600 available on the website of TED, a nonprofit organization that aims to “bring together the world’s most fascinating…

Read more

By Nadezhda Teffi (1872–1952), an author of short stories, poems, one-act plays, a novel, and a volume of memoirs. This story was first published in book form, in 1912. Translated…

Read more

From a November 25, 1848, article published in the Norfolk News, Eastern Counties Journal and Norwich, Yarmouth, and Lynn Commercial Gazette and included in Purring: Sport of the People, an…

Read more

By Gary Indiana, from A Significant Loss of Human Life, one of twenty-two pamphlets published by Semiotext(e) for this year’s Whitney Biennial, which is currently on view at the Whitney…

Read more

By Nikil Saval, from Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, out this month from Doubleday. Saval is an editor of n+1.

Read more

By William T. Vollmann, from Last Stories and Other Stories, to be published by Viking in July. Vollmann’s last article for Harper’s Magazine, “Life as a Terrorist,” appeared in the…

Read more