Dusty Pink, a French cult classic from 1972, is being published in English for the first time

  For the past few weeks, I’ve fixated on a collection of primary source material that reads like a tidy work of epistolary fiction. It’s a big book, nearly 1,300 pages, transcribed from original letters, postcards, and telegrams sent between …

Littérature, founded in 1919 by André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon, was couched as an innocent literary journal, but it was known for its avant-garde writings and critiques. In March 1922, André Breton launched Littérature: New Series…

Eve Babitz’s singular take on Los Angeles.Years ago, a friend gave me a first edition of Eve Babitz’s second book, Slow Days, Fast Company (1974), which had slipped out of print. Tucked inside was a promotional photo of the author on thick, glossy K…

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tearsI am writing this while pregnant with my first son, just as Sylvia Plath was when she wrote “Nick and the Candlestick” in 1962.I wanted him: he was no surprise or trouble a…

I had planned my disclaimer before he even opened the door. What kind of an idiot, I had realized belatedly, brings noted francophile and former Paris-dweller Edmund White bootleg, neon, NYC-made macaroons for tea at his apartment? “Mr. White, I am…

I hadn’t seen Jake since years ago, when we had met at the Guggenheim before going away to college. I remember only one scene from the encounter: spinning around the museum’s spiraling staircase with our arms spread like wings. When we reached th…

“Damned good-looking” is how Ernest Hemingway—or, rather, his antihero Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises—describes Lady Brett Ashley when she appears at a Parisian club with a mob of pretty boys. “Damned good-looking” is better than pretty. It…

The artist Joe Bradley has his studio in an old pencil factory in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There is no buzzer. You must call his cell phone to be let in, and then ride a manual elevator to the white concrete space where he works on the fifth floor. Brad…

Proust’s Overcoat tells the story of Jacques Guérin, a Parisian perfume magnate, who was obsessed with the works of Marcel Proust. In 1929, through a chance connection, he met Proust's family, only to discover that they intended to destroy the autho…