Let us consider, for example, Kafka’s elegant diary entry on 2 August 1914: ‘Germany has declared war on Russia—Swimming in the afternoon.’ From Xiao Hai’s memoir Adrift in the South (Granta Editions) ...

The man was writing like his typewriter was on fire and in flaming succession produced three books that have been called a ...

The nation is splattered with these zombie structures, or sutures, with nowhere to be and no path to total erasure.” ...

A sense of stagnation and stillness when what I want is for the book to open, open, open into something expansive and true.

“I had come to Poland to seek out the story of Count Rzewuski and other Polish adventurers who had traveled from the Ukrainian farmlands and Russian steppes south to the Levant and the Arabian ...

Over a period of several years in the early seventeenth century, there appeared in Western Europe three manifestos laying out the history of the theretofore unheard-of Rosicrucian order, whose secret ...

This year, we asked our contributors, our readers, our current and former interns, and other friends of the Review for their favorite books of the past year. Here’s what they said. Service by John ...

Just as the sun begins to peek over the flat horizon of Coon Rapids, Iowa, 1,383 pigeons fill the sky. The birds pour out as a single winged mass from the rows of flung-open coops on the transport ...

“A story doesn’t have to be simple, it doesn’t have to be one-dimensional but, especially if it’s multidimensional, you need to find the clearest, most engaging way of telling it.” ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...

I was fortunate to have traveled America’s blue highways in the golden age of roadside attractions. The year I fell in love with roadside attractions was 1971, when my husband, Michael, and I (newly ...

I tend not to think that stuff other people think is obvious is obvious. Everyone feels like they have some sense of Frost. Everyone knows a poem or two. That kind of overexposure lends an aspect of ...