My mamaw used to say, ‘I thought life was just one damned thing after another until I realized it’s the same damned thing ...

Dreams are trash. Dreams are ash. A man from Los Angeles left a small ziplock bag of his ashes to me in his will.” ...

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages.

My friend gave me the packet of letters to keep, and I knew that one day I would try to make something out of it.” ...

It seems certain to me that, on the same walk, two beings, unless they resemble each other in some strange sense, could not ...

Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, was originally called “A Happening.” There would have been something of a joke to this discarded title; from one point of view, nothing much happens in the book.

May 20, 2025 – On retro screen savers, Bianca Rae Messinger’s pleasureis amiracle, and Grandma’s iMac.

March 24, 2025 – “Many years ago, the first and only time I ever did acid, I looked down at my hands and noticed that they were not, in fact, “flesh-colored” after all, but contained dozens of colors: ...

At the peak of his literary fame, James Baldwin yearned for seclusion. He found it in Istanbul, where he lived on and off between 1961 and 1971. Baldwin was suffering from writer’s block when he ...

Tom Fitzharris and Edward Gorey met one afternoon in 1974 when Fitzharris, long a fan of Gorey’s books and illustrations, bumped into him outside of the Town Hall, the performance space in Midtown ...

Usually, institutional libraries are governed by highly codified policies. Their catalogues are their raison d’être, elegant data structures that facilitate easy circulation and millennial continuity.

August 23, 2024 – “I know that in 1969, while twilight, striped by the half-open venetian blinds, gathered in the parking lot behind the ballet studio where, in an hour, my mother would arrive in our ...