Page 4 | Harper's Magazine

Authors

Visible Cities

by Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin,

From Italo Calvino: Letters 1941–1985, out this month from Princeton University Press. Franco Maria Ricci, a publisher, commissioned Calvino to prepare a text for a volume containing reproductions of the…

Outside Over There

by Emma Brockes,

From an interview with children’s book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, by British journalist Emma Brockes, published in the November/December 2012 issue of The Believer. Sendak, whose many works include…

Nothing Serious

by Pico Iyer,

P. G. Wodehouse and the costs of innocence

Polivanov’s Dream

by Serena Vitale,Translated by Jamie Richards,

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…

Piggy Bank

by William Styron,

From a June 8, 1972, letter by William Styron to Frederick Exley, the author of A Fan’s Notes, who was a guest lecturer at the University of Iowa that year.…

Chore List of Champions

by Kurt Vonnegut,

From a January 26, 1947, contract between Kurt Vonnegut and his pregnant wife, Jane, to whom he had been married for sixteen months. Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield,…

Speakeasy

by Joshua Cohen,

A Czech’s boozy refuge from writer’s bloc

The elder modernist

by Wells Tower,

The burglary at Stormfield

by Mark Twain,

Call it Sleek

by Joshua Cohen,

The gentrification of Henry Roth

A Kink in His Crock

by William H. Gass,

Norway’s Nobel Nazi