Write a story in which the narrator refuses to tell the story. Permit the narrator to come close to telling the story—perhaps ...

I was trying to get down to the root where consciousness springs up under pressure from conflict and pain and power.” ...

Reading his Paris Review interview, you sense that Buckley was more keen to discuss fiction than most people were to ask him ...

From Jérémie Koering’s Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images (Zone Books), translated from the French by Nicholas Huckle ...

Most people, especially New Yorkers, who are proud of their tap water, mock my interest in mineral water; to them, “all water ...

January 1, 2026 – "On New Year’s Eve, you look backward and forward at the same time. Time stops, and you are in the now. You ...

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 ...

January 22, 2013 – Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the premiere of The Crucible. In this interview, Arthur Miller discusses the writing of the play, and the McCarthy ...

La Chanson de Roland is one of the major epic poems of the Middle Ages. It centers around one of Charlemagne’s adjutants, a prefect named Roland. Though billed as a “song,” it is a blood-soaked screed ...

October 26, 2012 – “TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”Daniel Horowitz takes on Poe’s classic 1843 tale of ...

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 ...

The difficulty of representing the past accurately—even if that past is itself a dream, a reconstruction of a reconstruction, a palimpsest of a palimpsest—is one known to people other than writers, of ...