From a response by the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) to a question by Serena Vitale, during an interview in Moscow in December 1978. Yevgeni Polivanov, who like Shklovsky…

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From Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera by Dave Malloy based on Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which ran last fall at Ars Nova in New York City.…

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From comments on the Wikipedia entry for the Beatles. Last fall, Wikipedia conducted a community-wide poll to settle the below dispute, which began in 2004. Users voted for lowercase “the.”…

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By Gordon Lish, from the fall 2012 issue of Salmagundi. A new edition of Lish’s novel Peru (1986) will be published next month by Dalkey Archive Press. I do not…

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By A. R. Ammons (1926–2001), from the Summer/Autumn 2012 issue of Chicago Review. If one of these helicopters tried to put down in my yard, the branches of my many…

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From a May 24, 1943, memo to British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, from Owen O’Malley, the British ambassador to the Polish government in exile, in the collection of the Franklin…

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From Two Cheers for Anarchism, published last month by Princeton University Press. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. In the summer of 1990, in an effort…

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Dedicated to poet Jerome Rothenberg on the occasion of his eightieth birthday last year. Bernstein’s Recalculating will be published this spring by The University of Chicago Press. The town is…

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From This Is Yellowism, the website of Marcin Lodyga and Vladimir Umanets. In October, Umanets took credit for writing “Vladimir Umanets ’12, a potential piece of yellowism” on a painting…

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From more than 8,000 letters to executives and directors of banks, posted last fall on the website Occupy the Boardroom and emailed to the addressees. A selection of 150 letters,…

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From Servabo: A Fin de Siècle Memoir, first published in Italian in 1991, and included in Memories from the Twentieth Century, edited by Alberto Toscano, a collection of three of…

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From God’s Law: The Only Political Solution, by Charles R. Fuqua, an e-book published in April and aiming to show how the Bible can be applied to U.S. law. Fuqua,…

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From an April 18, 2011, letter by Didier Mangione, the national secretary of the French union Unité SGP Police, to Hubert Weigel, head of France’s riot police. Weigel banned on-duty…

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From the July 2007 issue of HMI Profil, the newsletter of Hamburg-Mannheimer International, a German insurance company. In June 2007, HMI hired at least twenty prostitutes to entertain insurance salesmen…

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From a letter sent in January to the Gaston Gazette, a North Carolina newspaper, by Danny Hembree, a fifty-year-old death-row inmate at Raleigh’s Central Prison. Hembree was found guilty last…

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By Andrew J. Bacevich, from the September issue of The American Conservative. Bacevich’s article “Glory Days” appeared in the June issue of Harper’s Magazine. Peace means different things to different…

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From comments posted on YouTube about a rap video released in September by the Colombian guerrilla group FARC. The song describes their upcoming peace talks in Cuba and Norway with…

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From a May 23 expert-witness statement submitted as evidence in the trial of three members of the Russian activist collective Pussy Riot, who were sentenced in August to two years…

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From “ ‘Being There’ in Toronto,” a May 3, 1987, speech by Jerzy Kosinski. Oral Pleasure, a collection of Kosinski’s speeches, essays, and interviews, edited by Barbara Tepa Lupack and Kiki…

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From the 2011 testimony of Ira Isaacs, who was found guilty of obscenity in April, on charges relating to four videos he distributed through his company Stolen Car Films. Michael…

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From a 1979 letter by John Lennon to a laundry in New York City, where Lennon lived with his wife, Yoko Ono. The John Lennon Letters was published by Little,…

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