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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Discussed in this essay: Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark, by Cecelia Watson. Ecco. 224 pages. $19.99. Four Men Shaking: Searching for Sanity with Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer,…

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A twentieth-century Tolstoy and his forgotten novel

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On the Shining Path

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If there has ever been a historical moment apt to foster optimism of the intellect, right now would not appear to be it. So it’s heartening to see how much…

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Lore Segal reinvents the immigrant novel

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On Abbas Kiarostami

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Discussed in this essay: Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Penguin Press. 320 pages. $30. Humour, by Terry Eagleton. Yale University Press.…

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Did climate change create modern civilization?

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On a new history of Polynesia

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In “Shrink,” a short piece from her 1993 book Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream, the Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešic recounts, or imagines, trying…

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On Thomas Merton, fifty years after his death

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Christos Ikonomou’s modern tragedies

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Ten years ago, a week after his sixtieth birthday, and six months after his first appointment with an oncologist, my father died. That afternoon, I went to my parents’ bedroom…

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Spain’s answer to Knausgaard arrives in English

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Decoding the life and art of Cy Twombly

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How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 528 pages. $30. Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli. Knopf. 400 pages. $27.95. Territory…

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On Giorgio Bassani’s Novel of Ferrara

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Could there be a more alarming role model for a writer than Scheherazade? You tell a story and, worst case, your head is cut off. Best case: the would-be decapitator…

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Pawe? Pawlikowski’s search for roots

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On an anthology of Oulipo

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At dinner in San Francisco’s Tenderloin in 1976, the writer Armistead Maupin urged Rock Hudson, the twentieth century’s most famously closeted heartthrob, to come out by writing a book. Hudson’s…

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Orson Welles sets the record straight

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Mary Robison’s fiction of the superfluous

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Discussed in this essay: Vile Days, by Gary Indiana, edited by Bruce Hainley. Semiotext(e). 600 pages. $29.95. Seasonal Associate, by Heike Geissler, translated by Katy Derbyshire. Semiotext(e). 240 pages. $16.95. The Children’s Bach,…

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