Childhood and youth Archives

Childhood and youth

The Path to Freedom

by Édouard Louis,Translated by Tash Aw,

From the introduction to A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, a book about the author’s mother, which will be published next month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Translated from the French.…

The Girl in the Picture

by Madeleine Watts,

Precocious puberty and its reflection

Love and Acid

by Chris Rush,

On the road with a secret weapon

A Little Girl’s New York

by Edith Wharton,

In my seventeenth year, there suddenly appeared in Fifth Avenue a very small canary-yellow brougham with dark trimmings, drawn by a big, high-stepping bay and driven by a coachman who…

The Civil Rights Act’s Unsung Victory

by Randall Kennedy,

And how it changed the South

Anna Maria

by Luciana Castellina, Patrick Camiller,

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.

The Trees Step Out of the Forest

by Barbara Ehrenreich,

By Barbara Ehrenreich, from Living with a Wild God, out next month from Twelve. Ehrenreich, a longtime contributor to Harper’s Magazine, is the author of many books, including, most recently,…

On Nudity

by Norman Rush,

By Norman Rush, from Granta 126, published earlier this year. Rush is the author of several works of fiction, including, most recently, Subtle Bodies. From an early age, I was…

The Boys on the Block

by Gordon Lish,

My personal memoir

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…

Othello’s Son

by Frederic Morton,

A racial education