The October leaves coming down, as if called. Morning fog through the wild rye beyond the train tracks. A cigarette. A good sweater. On the sagging porch. While the family sleeps. That I woke at all & ...

The word “relevant,” I was recently surprised to discover, shares an etymology with the word “relieve.” This seems obvious enough once you know it—only a few letters separate the words—but their ...

Pen remembers it all. It was 1968. They took a family vacation to Sanibel. Pen’s father drove the station wagon. He held the wheel tightly and gritted his teeth and smoked cigarettes when he wasn’t ...

Daniel Kolitz, author of “The Goon Squad,” on the grotesque, his inventive journalistic approach, and the psychic toll of spending too much time in the GoonVerse.

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 ...

Requiem, Op. 59, by Arnold Rosner. Toccata Classics. $18.99. In the spring of 1970, I was about to enter the Manhattan School of Music to pursue the study of musicology. At the time, I was working at ...

From the book When We Cease to Understand the World. The book, a fictionalized retelling of a series of scientific and mathematical discoveries, was published last month by New York Review Books.

No one is entirely sure when magical penis loss first came to Africa. One early incident was recounted by Dr. Sunday Ilechukwu, a psychiatrist, in a letter some years ago to the Transcultural ...

Does anyone believe in college education anymore? Republicans certainly don’t—a mere 19 percent of them expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education in a Gallup poll ...

The last time I ate real food, actually chewed and swallowed, was six years ago. During those final meals, I ordered a pastrami sandwich, a pork-belly bun, and vegetable soup. The sandwich needed more ...

After just a couple of days on bed rest, the material of your body begins to feel different: softer, heavier, a burden to the bone beneath. The thud of the heart in the chest feels deeper: each beat ...

The idea that literature contains multitudes is not new. For the greater part of its history, lit(t)eratura referred to any writing formed with letters. Up until the eighteenth century, the only true ...