Page 3 | Harper's Magazine

Authors

Each According to His Ability

From responses by Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) to authors who submitted manuscripts in 1920 to The Red Village, a newspaper that he edited. Platonov’s novels include Chevengur and The Foundation Pit;…

Brussels Spleen

by Charles Baudelaire,Translated by Richard Sieburth,

From an outline for a book Charles Baudelaire planned to write on Belgium, where he lived from 1864 until shortly before his death, in 1867. The outline is published in…

A Portrait of the Artist as a Syphilitic

by Kevin Birmingham,

Revisiting James Joyce’s medical record

Voltaire in Vichy

by Jean Guéhenno,Translated by David Ball,

By Jean Guéhenno, from Diary of the Dark Years, 1940–1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris, out this month from Oxford University Press. Guéhenno (1890–1978) was a writer,…

Agreeable Angstrom

by Jonathan Dee,

John Updike, Yes-Man

Humor

by Mark Twain,

Repetition is a mighty power in the domain of humor. I undertook to prove the truth of this forty years ago in San Francisco on the occasion of my second…

L’amour filial

by Charlotte Brontë,Translated by Sue Lonoff de Cuevas,

By Charlotte Brontë, from an essay written while she was a twenty-six-year-old student at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels. The essay, dated August 5, 1842, was discovered last year in…

Life as a Terrorist

by William T. Vollmann,

Uncovering my FBI file

A Different Kind of Father

by Jonathan Franzen,

By Jonathan Franzen, from a footnote to his translation of “Nestroy and Posterity,” a 1912 essay by the Austrian satirist, playwright, poet, aphorist, and critic Karl Kraus (1874–1936). In the…

Bartleby on the Prairie

by Paul Elie,

The unspent life of J. F. Powers

Incoherence Abroad

by Carl Jensen,

From a letter to Mark Twain, postmarked October 1, 1879, from Carl Jensen, a customs officer in Stubbekøbing, Denmark. Twain’s annotation reads, “Preserve this remarkable letter.” Dear Mark Twain: Letters…