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Psychological aspects

Song and Dance

by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Witold Szabłowski,

By Witold Szablowski, from Dancing Bears, a book of reportage that will be published next month by Penguin Books. Szab?owski is a journalist. Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

The Spaceship and the Moose

by Walter Kirn,

A dozen of us sat and stood around the campfire, guests at a lodge in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains. My wife and I were there to hike and sleep and celebrate…

Churl Next Door

by Marcel Proust,

From letters that Marcel Proust wrote to his neighbors Marie and Charles Williams between 1908 and 1916, while he lived at 102 Boulevard Haussmann, in Paris. Charles Williams owned a…

Lord of the Files

by Aleksandr Zinoviev,

By Alexander Zinoviev, from Homo Sovieticus, a novel that was originally published in 1985 and is included in Boredom, an anthology that was published in January by M.I.T. Press and…

Safety in Numbers

by Gary Greenberg,

The mathematics of predicting war

Nice Girls

by Mary Gaitskill,

When I was growing up in the 1960s, I was taught by the adult world that good girls never had sex and bad girls did. This rule had clarity going…

Remains of the Day

by Christa Wolf, Katy Derbyshire,

By Christa Wolf (1929–2011), from One Day a Year, a journal that she kept each September 27 from 1960 until her death. The most recent volume will be published next month by…

Without a Fight

by Adam Zagajewski, Clare Cavanagh,

By Adam Zagajewski, from Slight Exaggeration, a memoir that will be published next month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Zagajewski is a poet and essayist. Translated from the Polish by…