So this is a big election for you in Italy?’ I asked her. ‘Oh my God!’ she cried, admonishing me. ‘That is an understatement!

I came to the work of Harry Crews through word of mouth. A friend was telling me about this fucked-up guy and his book A ...

Photograph by Marco Borggreve. Courtesy of Alisa Weilerstein.

A.M. On election day, all normal time stopped. From early in the morning, friends sent me footage of lines snaking around buildings, through parks, down cit ...

In 1934, Columbia University moved its twenty-two miles of books to the newly built Butler Library. By means of a really long slide. Which actually looks less fun than it sounds, and was much too ...

February 19, 2015 – André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t ...

“Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To ...

And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and raped and very nearly killed. It ...

In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. This month, she examines an anomalous work, They, in Kay Dick’s already anomalous oeuvre. Kay ...

An encounter with Emerson’s essays. This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as ...

Where to begin? I am sitting at a desk, looking at a first edition of Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild, and looking out the window at San Francisco Bay. San Francisco Bay is the largest estuary ...