I first read the Book of Revelation in a green pocket-size King James New Testament published by the motel missionaries Gideons International. I was in seventh grade. I remember reading the tiny Bible ...

On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger, translated from the German by Tess Lewis. New York Review Books. 144 pages. $14.95. Ernst Jünger is the intractable land mine of German literature. Demolition ...

When the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and a mask. This was a ...

The moment I lost my fertility I started searching for a baby. At age thirty-one, after almost two decades of chronic pain caused by endometriosis and its little-studied ravages, I had my uterus, my ...

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I led a virtual discussion of War and Peace, with the thought that someone else might enjoy reading the novel with me. Three thousand people ended up ...

Writing about “Woke” has at least two pitfalls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is ...

The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants, by Adam Goodman. Princeton University Press. 336 pages. $29.95. What we imagine when we think of deportation proceedings, if we ...

The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood, Youth, Dependency, by Tove Ditlevsen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 384 pages. $30. Are you sad? Unmoored? Confused? As a child were you deemed “sensitive,” as a young ...

In 1974, my mother was twenty years old, trying to make it as a theater actress in New York after dropping out of Bennington College. She was in a painting class led by the eccentric Ukrainian-Jewish ...

Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...

During the worst romance of my life, I often fantasized about holding a funeral for the relationship. Over time, I worked the fantasy out in detail: I had picked a location and imagined congregating ...

From an introduction to the audiobook edition of J. F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, which was released in May by Hachette Audio. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the ...