This is America, I thought, it isn’t right to deny an adult—a paying customer—a beer.” ...

César Aira coined the term “the flight forward” (huirhacia adelante) to describe his deceptively simple writing process. Every morning he writes for one hour at a local Buenos Aires café and then in ...

The End is what I call a CD painting, a reverse-glass painting I painted on plexiglass to obscure part of an image from the cover of Mariah Carey’s Rainbow. I probably shouldn’t go on too much about ...

When I arrived in Sheffield, England, last year and walked to the Crucible Theatre, it was not immediately clear that I was approaching the mecca of a sport watched by millions. Sheffield feels more ...

In 2015 I was dating three fellows at once. A mudder, a lawyer, and a prince. The mudder was Greek and on weekdays he did something with computers in a sealed room where dust meant ruination, and on ...

October 12, 2012 – In honor of “Daddy”’s fiftieth birthday, listen to the author herself read.

In 1934, Columbia University moved its twenty-two miles of books to the newly built Butler Library. By means of a really long slide. Which actually looks less fun than it sounds, and was much too ...

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 ...

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 ...

On a low-pollution Sunday last December, the weekend before Christmas, I headed to People’s Park on Shanghai’s Nanjing Road to visit the city’s so-called marriage market: a cluster of footpaths and ...

Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start ...

I began writing this essay while putting off writing another one. My apartment is full of books I haven’t read, and others I read so long ago that I barely remember what’s in them. When I’m writing ...