I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon. A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended ...

Sheila and I were best friends from age ten to thirteen. I lived four blocks from our grade school and she two. She’d wait for me to pass her house in the morning and then we’d fall in step as we ...

Discussed in this essay: Age of Cage: Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career, by Keith Phipps.Henry Holt. 288 pages. $27.99. Last fall, hoping to draw weary crowds back to the multiplex ...

O ne night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact ...

Discussed in this essay: The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Harper Perennial. 400 pages. $16.99.. The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow.Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 704 pages.

Discussed in this essay: A Girl’s Story, by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer. Seven Stories Press. 160 pages. $18.95. A Man’s Place, by Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie. Seven ...

Discussed in this essay: Collected Works, by Charles Portis. Library of America. 1,105 pages. $45. Not long before Charles Portis visited Buckingham Palace in the summer of 1964, having secured a rare ...

Ninety minutes west of Boston, up the road from a Benedictine monastery, lies what is perhaps the most studied forest on Earth. Since 1907, when the first of these 3,850 acres of black oak and red ...

One of the scenes the M.A.S. most loves in its cinematic corpus is an homage to Marilynity performed by Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I’m talking of course about the musical number in the ...

When the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and a mask. This was a ...

In December 2022, Time magazine named the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky its Person of the Year. The reasons seemed obvious: When Russia invaded in February of that year, few thought that ...

It has inspired Stephen King’s novella “The Langoliers,” and Tom Perrotta’s novel The Leftovers, which was made into one of the best TV series of the century, not to mention Tim LaHaye and Jerry B.