“What I really believe is that there are no minor characters in life or in art.”

 

“In general, the food world … it’s just so against our nature.”

“There’s the usual escapist appeal—that of gritty procedurals, cozy mysteries, or romances: wishes fulfilled, things tied up neatly, and order in a chaotic world, with the added bonus of a type of immortality.”

“I think Professor Bhaer is Jewish,” my mother said, her voice vibrating with barely suppressed excitement, “Look into it! You are the Bhaer detective!”

In honor of Black Friday, we bring you a poem and also deals. Everything in our store (except subscriptions and prints) is ten percent off with the code "NOVEMBER." Who do you know who might like a Paris Review T-Shirt (or a baby-sized onesie) for…

  Many years ago, I brought an old boyfriend to the Hall of Gems and Minerals at the Natural History Museum. I’d told him all about it: how many hours of my childhood had been spent roaming the dun-carpeted halls under the flourescent lights, ga…

  The other day, I went to see a movie. It was two P.M.; I was alone. The theater nearest our apartment is extremely comfortable, with large, fluffy, fully reclining seats and swinging armrests for easy canoodling. Yet the movies on the screen…

“Your father,” says my husband. “Your father might be the least-likely-to-see-a-ghost-person I’ve ever met.”

The most distressing of my mother’s ghost sightings took place while she was in college. Eager to get the facts right, on a recent visit I asked her—we were finishing dinner—about the exact circumstances.

“Aren’t you scared living there?” When I said why, he looked at me pityingly and said, “You mean you don’t know?” and explained that the room was haunted.

Although I have never seen a ghost, I have claimed to have seen one. This was when I was a child, and mistakenly believed this sort of lie gave me a certain obscure, cachet. I wasn’t a habitual liar—I was never very good at it.

The first ghost my mother ever saw was her dead best friend. Although I’ve known about the sighting all my life, I don’t know much about Ellen herself.

It is a strange thing to monetize your emotions. Anyone who writes or creates knows this. And the work one does on the Internet feels insubstantial, even by the flimsy standards of intellectual property. Any body of digital work is a funny mixture of…

The same day I ate the hot dog—indeed, the same layover—I found myself in conversation with a group of other travelers. One commented on the crowds, and another said, “Tampa’s not a small place but it’s nothing like this,” and they all ta…

I had a brief layover in Chicago. I was starving, slightly shaky with hunger, and getting to the point where any option seemed wrong. In that state, it seemed I didn’t deserve food, and probably I would never eat again. People talk a lot about the …

“I guess we’re all going to the same place,” said one of the women, as we all entered the elevator and hit twenty-three. “Are you a lawyer?” she asked, turning to me. I privately congratulated myself on the authenticity of my costume. “No…

Today I happened to pass one of my favorite spots, Myzel’s Chocolates—a small, idiosyncratic shop in midtown Manhattan, with a world of confections. For the licorice lover—that strange, fierce, embattled tribe—the store is a must. Myzel’s h…

I’m not afraid of flying, but I’m deathly afraid of flying underprepared. I’m a light packer when it comes to clothes, but my carry-on is unwieldy and absurd. Any trip demands at least two books—one fun, one serious—and a couple of magazine…

On a plane, I sat between an aging nerd and a teenage boy. The nerd informed us both with contemptuous superiority that we’d be told to put our bags up in the bin and then, when we were, said, “I told you.” He spent the rest of the flight playi…

I pity you, because presumably you—unlike me—do not own an apron that features a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and the word thou. So how could you possibly celebrate the birthday of Omar Khayyám? You could read from the Rubaiyat, of course. If you ha…

Perhaps you ran across a story in today’s New York Times about re-creating Emily Dickinson’s Amherst garden. Historians are discovering the layout of the family’s conservatory and planting heirloom varieties of fruit trees that would’ve grown …

Good madonna, give me leave to prove you a fool. —William Shakespeare, Twelfth NightI feel sorry for people who don’t suffer fools. They’re missing out on so much! The quotidian, absurd human comedy; several of Shakespeare’s finest characters; …

At a coffee shop, standing on line (because I’m a New Yorker, and for some reason that’s where we stand with lines—on them, never in them), I began to cry. This in itself was not so extraordinary—the mascara has not yet been invented that’s proof…

Although she died in 1982, at the age of ninety, Djuna Barnes seems to have recorded her voice on only a few occasions. The tape below was made in her Patchin Place home in 1971. Barnes is best known for Nightwood, her modernist classic, but she had…

As a young woman, I went on a few highly improbable dates with a guy who did something in the realm of what, in my family, we call “beeswax.” After a few absurdly adult dinners at real restaurants, I told him we shouldn’t see each other any mor…

Many people hate the word moist. Indeed, it has become almost expected to hate the word moist, with its connotations of limp handshakes, cloying Uriah Heep types, and creeping damp. A recent study found that the aversion was real, reported the New Yo…

As I write this, there are six workmen constructing a building within five feet of the window, as has been the case for the past eight months and will be for the foreseeable future. It’s not a quiet business at the best of times, and at the moment …

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary; 
It rains, and the wind is never weary; 
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall, 
But at every gust the dead leaves fall, 
And the day is dark and dreary. —Longfellow, “The Rainy Day”In New York, th…

I’m terrified by the concept of the green thumb. Your proverbial green thumb combines all the factors for maximum intimidation: he or she has the worthy ability to interest herself in something really boring, a general competence and practicality, …

Those of you who were spared the three chapters of the saga that was The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills “Reunion” missed something. Well, you missed a lot of things—mainly people accusing Lisa Vanderpump of various machinations involving the rumo…

Lee Bailey’s books are some of my favorite comfort reads. Bailey, a designer and eighties-era entertaining doyen described in the intro to one book as “a model of style, taste, and invention,” was a famous host with the smart set, and in books like L…

Last Friday I wrote about an encounter with the platinum card­–carrying elite. But this is a two-part story, you see. For many years later, long after that glimpse into the lives of the rarefied, I found myself at the local flea market.This is a s…

It’s not as if I could afford it. I could never have afforded a nightgown that expensive, and in that moment of my life—marginally employed, tenuously housed, financially and otherwise insecure—I could afford it even less than usual. The week b…

One of the many treasures preserved in the British Library’s audio archive is this vintage lesson in “English Conversation.” As a document of instruction, it’s interesting enough. But it also bears the distinction of being an early recording …

My mother has been on somewhat of a socialite kick lately. For a while, when I talked to her, she was reading No Regrets: The Life of Marietta Tree. “Someone who ought to have had a lot of regrets,” was her acid review. From there, she moved on to …

To a little kid, the county fair was pure enchantment. There was a puppet show and a 4-H cake booth and animals and gardens. There were kiddie rides, too, and a man who made wonderful charms out of molten glass. My favorite activity was the “fish p…

“How are you?” asked a smiling acquaintance on the street. “Well, I’m pretty down about Prince—but aren’t we all?” I said reprovingly. “Oh yes,” she murmured. “Of course.” I saw her blinking quickly in an effort to summon tear…

The NPR station WNYC is hosting an initiative they call Wild New York, in which listeners are encouraged to snap and submit pictures of urban nature. The idea is to celebrate Earth Day by drawing city dwellers’ attention to the beauty all around us…

PEDICULARE, the lousie disease, that is when the bodie is pestred and full of lice and nits.
—Iohn Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, or Most Copious, and Exact Dictionarie in Italian and English Think of the above as an indirect nod to Shakespeare’…

When I rejoined my husband, the first thing he said was, “I love that perfume!”“That’s just as well,” I said shortly.Here’s what had happened: I’d taken refuge from the weather in a shop. Guiltily aware that I wouldn’t be buying anyth…

“Oh my God,” I said, turning to my husband with tears in my eyes.“What is it?” he asked, understandably alarmed. The train had stopped at a Connecticut station—Rowayton, maybe—and it smelled like sun-warmed Naugahyde and Metro-North and c…

I used to like buying cheese. You could say it was one of the small, reliable pleasures of my week. I never bought a great deal—usually just a small piece to eat for lunch with some bread and fruit—but I enjoyed the process of tasting and learnin…

Life is but a day:
A fragile dewdrop on its perilious way
From a tree’s summit
—John KeatsLast night I heard the singer-songwriter Emmy the Great cover “Who Knows Where the Time Goes.” It was beautiful. That song is one that lends itself to cov…

Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of …

The first time I remember lying about why I was crying was in second grade. I’d burst out sobbing in the middle of social studies and, rather than admit I’d been thinking about the plot of “The Little Match Girl,” I claimed vaguely that there…

Beverly Cleary has turned one hundred. And while there’s no shortage of well-deserved and lovely tributes out there, I wanted to take a moment to talk about one of my favorite of her books: Fifteen, a YA novel published in 1956. Like all of Cleary’…

The other day I noticed something for the first time. “Please allow all customers off the train,” said the recorded voice over the subway sound system. Customers. Not passengers, not riders: customers. What did it mean? Something bureaucratic, obvi…

Whenever someone talks about how they never meet any native New Yorkers—this is an odd cliché people are given to—I want to tell them, just go to Fairway Market on a Saturday with no makeup on. You'll see everyone I went to high school with, an…

 Earlier today, the New York City Council voted to restrict the antics of the various costumed characters in Times Square. As the New York Times delicately put it, “After an uproar last summer over nudity and aggressive tip-seeking in Times Square…

April 6 marks Tartan Day: on this day in 1320, the Declaration of Arbroath was signed, asserting Scottish independence. As the BBC describes, The Declaration is a Latin letter which was sent to Pope John XXII in April/May 1320. It was most likely…

It recently occurred to me that there is one aspect of parties I actively dread. It’s not the socializing. It’s not the dressing up—although it’s true I am not burdened by talent in the hair or makeup department, and begrudge the expense. Wh…

The other day, our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, drew our attention to a really interesting recent episode of the BBC’s History Hour. It was a program dedicated in part to the death of Virginia Woolf, who took her own life on March 28, 194…

Guess who I ran into this morning? Three guesses. And if you guessed Jacob, my neighborhood friend, you’re right! I was enjoying a toasted, buttered bialy, a coffee-cart small, and a newspaper on a traffic island, when who should sit down on the b…

It all started about a month ago. A close friend was celebrating a big birthday, and I planned to buy her a set of nice lotions and potions in a pricey scent I knew she loved. So I looked up the address of the shop, walked across the park, headed upt…

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
—Doctor ZhivagoI’ve always liked the term morbid sensitivity, which seems to suggest not just something unhealthy but actually dangerous. To be morbidly s…

I was in a cab with a radar detector. “Red light camera ahead,” droned the automated voice from the front seat. “Doesn’t the city mind those?” I said. “It’s great, but doesn’t the city lose a lot of revenue? Because they point out sp…

The other day, my husband and I were talking about putting together a playlist for our nieces: a list of empowering, kid-appropriate songs in which women were treated with respect. We had fun thinking of titles: Aretha and All Hail the Queen and plen…

I’m currently observing a real-time courtesy lapse so blatant and so amazing that I must give voice to my electrified horror. The scene: a coffee shop, late morning. The players: assorted people drinking hot beverages and working on their computers…

In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote,At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, If I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought…

It goes without saying that James Baldwin was a legendary speaker—a preacher turned orator turned public intellectual who knew the power of words. But hearing him never ceases to shock. Very little can be added to this mesmerizing recording of Bald…

Yesterday morning, the New York Times reported that the prolific James Patterson is starting a new venture: a series of exciting, novella-length books called BookShots. Says the story:Mr. Patterson said the books would be aimed at readers who might n…

There’s an expression called “using too many points.” It refers to those moments when a novelist (or any storyteller, really) strains credulity by using too many coincidences or easy plot twists or intersecting plotlines. It’s when the reader…

Paris’s Musée des Arts and Métiers, which reopened in 2000, is an age-of-reason triumph—it’s even on the site of an old priory. Devoted to inventions of all kinds, it’s divided into sections like Materials, Energy, Mechanics, Construction,…

When I lived in France, I volunteered a couple of times a week at a major expat cultural center. I’d intended just to help out at the soup kitchen and maybe with a little tutoring, but this somehow also turned into working the security desk, too, u…

Before I traveled to France this week, I made myself go back and read my diaries from the time I’d lived there, years ago. I had avoided rereading them ever since, and I was relieved to find, in my actual words, very little of the sadness I knew lu…

“Never saw him write even the shortest note standing up,” Proust’s housekeeper Celeste Albaret wrote. Proust, it seems, spent the better part of his day—and the last three years of his life—in his spartan, cork-lined bedroom. He wrote, acco…

The French are known for how they wear scarves. That’s such a cliché that it hardly merits repeating. But like so many clichés, it’s rooted in truth. And today I was reminded of that.I was at a clothing store in Paris. While I sat on a low benc…

The other day, lacking something to read, I picked up a book at the Paris Review offices: Eleanor Perenyi’s More Was Lost, published in 1946 and recently reissued by New York Review Classics. Perenyi is probably best known today for her 1981 gardenin…

Though the calendar disagrees, for the past two days it’s been spring in the northeast. Everyone is going wild. Premature sunbathing is rampant. “Spring fever,” an old man winked at me—but then, that’s what I get for sitting on a traffic is…

At the ninety-nine-cent store, I looked in vain for a bathtub stopper. “Can I help you?” asked a woman, presumably the owner. When I told her what I was looking for, she flew to a seemingly random shelf and began to scan it with a gimlet eye. She…

There’s something profoundly sad about being surrounded by books and unable to find anything to read. It feels like a failure: yours, society’s, the universe’s. It can happen in a poorly stocked library branch, a failing bookstore, an airport n…

I never met Pat Conroy, but he was a frequent companion at our family dinner table. Since his death last week, everyone who knew him has talked a lot about his generosity, his sense of fun, his menschiness. I knew him as a cook. Writers’ cookbooks…

I took a taxi to an appointment lately and the driver was very talkative. I learned all about his life, his early baseball prospects, his divorce, his daughter, his newborn grandson. He hoped to teach the child to play baseball, which got us on the s…

Yesterday I had one of those moments of everyday wonder that helps tint a life. I’m still not sure where it came from, exactly. I was getting a stirrer for my tea at a downtown coffee shop—no place fancy or very expensive—and there alongside th…

I love bookstores, but there’s something that needs to be said: they’re often filled with lurking creeps. True, creeps lurk everywhere, certainly in New York City, and true, bookstores are also filled with wonderful people who love to read and ar…

Growing up, our house was filled with presidents and almost presidents. WIN WITH WILLKIE! blared a sign on our front door. Wilson, having “kept us out of war,” looked down benevolently as you mounted the stairs. At the top, you might be confronte…

Before Sadie was a baby name or even a dog name, hearing it would elicit one of two responses: singing (either “Sexy Sadie” or “Sadie Sadie, married lady”) or references to Sadie Hawkins. Since for most of my childhood I had pretensions to ne…

This week, Sadie is taking an in-depth look at Professor Bhaer, the most divisive character in Little Women. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. Today: Professor Bhaer in film and TV adaptations of Little Women.   1933: There aren’t many Bha…

This week, Sadie is taking an in-depth look at Professor Bhaer, the most divisive character in Little Women. Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.We know he’s kind, emotional, and paternalistic. We know he loves children. But how many facts do we really h…

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious by these sons of Bhaer!
—Jo’s BoysRead Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Men, or Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys, in 1871; Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out: A Sequel to …

Read Part 1 here.As often as I’ve read Little Women, I found that I didn’t have very distinct memories of Bhaer—not the way I did of Jo or Amy or Laurie. Despite his recurrence in the later books, he’d faded into a somewhat two-dimensional char…

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In 1912, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire published “Le Pont Mirabeau” in the journal Les Soirées de Paris; a year later the poem appeared in his collection Alcools. Even in Apollinaire’s lifetime, the melancholy piece—which uses the image…

This account of Georg Eberhard Rumpf, a seventeenth-century botanist, is fascinating enough. But can we talk about the fact that he was manifestly the inspiration for one of the greatest characters in all picture-book literature, Barbara Cooney’s L…

At the time of this interview, Mrs. Parker was living in a midtown New York hotel. She shared her small apartment with a youthful poodle that had the run of the place and had caused it to look, as Mrs. Parker said apologetically, somewhat “Hogart…

Lyricist Sameer Anjaan has entered The Guinness Book of World Records—they had to make a new category—for writing the greatest number of Bollywood songs, ever. By the numbers: 3,524 songs, 650 films, 33 years. Writes his biographer, “Sameer wa…

Here’s the thing: This ad wasn’t just in the Winter 1968 issue of The Paris Review. It was on the back cover. And incidentally, if this brutal, vivid, and immediate glimpse makes you want to journey further beyond the conventions of reality, check ou…

It is possible that Radiohead was inspired by William Blake in the writing of OK Computer. It is probable that Thom Yorke donated a copy of Songs of Innocence to a local Oxfam thrift store and it had “Airbag” lyrics in it. Either way: good score.…

“The only thing harder than crafting a good pun,” wrote Ted Trautman in these pages, “is finding someone to appreciate it.” But as Trautman makes clear, those people who love puns really love puns. They’re the Peeps eaters of the wordplay world: fe…

“My First Time” is a  video series in which we invite authors to discuss the trials of writing and publishing their first books. Consider it a chance to see how successful writers got their start, in their own words—it’s a portrait of the arti…

To die in literature is to achieve fictional immortality, argues John Williams. “Just a cursory list of memorable deaths (spoilers ahead) can make all of literature seem like one long Edward Gorey strip: Cathy in Wuthering Heights; Beth in Little Wom…

Happy Presidents’ Day! Martha Hodes’s Mourning Lincoln has won the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. The prize committee described the NYU Professor’s book as “a stunning and enlightening work that underscores the rage that Lincoln’s assassinati…

I’ve been trying for some days now to think of something really romantic to recommend to people for Valentine’s Day. But it seems that many of the things I thought were romantic are, in fact, creepy. I’ve learned this since getting married and …

It’s hard not to have mixed feelings about Florence King after reading her famous memoir, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady (1985). She’s … idiosyncratic, certainly. Brave, in certain respects. Independent-minded, yes, and not afraid of being…

Once, some years ago, I went with a good friend to see that Russian cat circus. It was my friend’s birthday, and seeing said cat circus was a long and dearly held dream of hers. If memory serves, the cat circus took place at a college of criminal j…

Over the weekend, Turner Classic Movies ran the 1954 A Star Is Born as part of its Month of Oscars: the single greatest page of the TV-watching calendar. Anyway, by the end—between the tragic irony of Judy Garland starring in a film about addictio…

Yes, the War and Peace miniseries currently airing in the U.S. makes for riveting viewing. But is it as riveting, I ask, as watching thirteen hundred Russians recite the entirety of War and Peace over a period of sixty hours?! Well, I suppose it de…

With all the controversy surrounding the renaming of problematic buildings, it seems fitting to draw attention to another bit of suspicious rebranding. Perhaps you’ve seen the BBC miniseries previewed above. “Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were Non…

I am fully and intensely aware that plants are conscious of love and respond to it as they do to nothing else. —Celia Thaxter Last year, I picked up a book called An Island Garden by Celia Thaxter. I’m not interested in gardening—I can’t keep a…

Thinking about travel books reminded me of a great piece written for this site by Kim Beeman a few years ago. As she explained at the time, the cult figure George Leonard Herter “ran a sporting-goods store in Waseca, Minnesota, by day and self-pu…

I’m changing. I have the right, don’t I? People are changing all the time. I have to think about my future. What’s it to you? —The RoomLisa’s right: you’re never too old to change. When I think that, a year ago, I had never heard the term armchair co…

 Not long ago, the Complete Traveller Antiquarian Bookstore—one of New York’s increasingly rare single-topic booksellers—shut its doors. And now its longtime proprietor, Arnold Greenberg, has died at eighty-three. “There is no villain in th…

Another person is the best way to learn about a book. At least, it’s my favorite; good reviews are an art form, Web sites a modern marvel, but somehow my best-loved books have come directly from someone else’s recommendation, and the enthusiasm o…

Earlier this week, many of us were electrified by the announcement that an unpublished Beatrix Potter book, The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots, would come out this September. The story was discovered in a cache of papers by the editor Jo Hanks. And Penguin …

I don’t believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots. —Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)This is my second post about Karen Blixen this week,…

A snowstorm brings with it an abundance of opportunities for philanthropy: neighbors with walks to shovel, older people to help over drifts, cars to dig out, shut-ins to visit and feed. You see the best of humanity, a hundred times a day, at relative…

INTERVIEWERWhat is your favorite fruit?DINESENStrawberries.INTERVIEWERDo you like monkeys?DINESENYes, I love them in art: In pictures, in stories, in porcelain, but in life they somehow look so sad. They make me nervous. I like lions and gazelles.—…

Among my other compulsions, I have an addiction to books about entertaining. Specifically, I suck at cooking but here are my tricks for impressing everyone books. This category encompasses titles like Peg Bracken’s classic The I Hate to Cook Book, bu…

I inquired about the mechanism of these figures. I wanted to know how it is possible, without having a maze of strings attached to one's fingers, to move the separate limbs and extremities in the rhythm of the dance. His answer was that I must not im…

Read Part I here.After we’d left the flea market, we walked across Central Park. I had, in the end, rejected all but the most alluring treasures: the 1970s Harlequin romances, a beloved Little Golden Book—Pantaloon—a sort of novelty all-purpose kit…

It was so cold that most of the flea market’s usual vendors hadn’t shown up. The blacktop playground was bare. Customers were so scarce that one seller chased us down the street offering ever-lower prices on a painting. We said no thank you. We d…

The other evening, my friend Patrick was telling me about his recent visit to Plymouth Grove, the Manchester home of the Victorian writer Mrs. Gaskell. The house was restored and reopened to the public in 2011; it contains many of the author’s pers…

This week, I started obsessively revisiting the 1997 album Closed on Account of Rabies, which features Edgar Allan Poe poems and stories interpreted by the likes of Jeff Buckley, Marianne Faithfull, Christopher Walken, and Debbie Harry. (David Bowie,…

A few weeks ago, I woke up one day feeling awful. I inventoried my symptoms. I didn’t seem to be getting sick. I hadn’t had too much to drink. Was it food poisoning? No—the slight ache in my stomach wasn’t, exactly, physical. And then it all …

Back when our family dog was not dead, he would vacation at the home of a woman named Janet. Hank was a pound mutt with shepherd coloring and terrier brains and a sensitive, Mr. Chips–like face that spoke of past sufferings. He and my dad were inse…

This is weather for inspiration: for films and books and good listening. If you’re in New York, go see the new restoration of Orson Welles’s 1966 Chimes at Midnight. (Or Midnite, as it says on the Film Forum marquee.) If you’re not, you’ll be abl…

There’s a book I’ve returned to again and again, ever since its clementine-orange cover first caught my eye at a museum bookstore: A Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky, translated from the German by Christine Lo. The subtitle is Fift…

I lost an idea last night. It was late, and I was tired, and I had some kind of insight that seemed interesting—but, with hubris worthy of a Greek tragedy, I told myself I’d remember in the morning. Of course, I didn’t. All I remembered was the…

 Two things only the people actually desire: bread and circuses. –Juvenal When I fall prey to the black dog, it’s easy to tell. My depression manifests in baking: jars filled with rapidly aging cookies, racks of untouched cupcakes, freezers glu…

At the start of the new year, Georgia’s oldest bookstore turned 125. Horton’s Books and Gifts is in Carrollton, west of Atlanta. Its founder, N. A. Horton, was an undertaker who, in 1891, decided to sell schoolbooks in his other business—which is …

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats. —Iris MurdochThe New Year comes as a relief: it’s like the morning after a good cry. You feel exhausted, yes, and hollowed out, but unburdened, too. What do you do? Well, you go back …

We’re away until January 4, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!Back when I was at my loneliest, I decided it would be a good idea to force myself to do all sorts of things alone. It’s…

We’re away until January 4, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!Contrary to popular wisdom, in my experience many of the best comebacks are not cutting. L’esprit d’escalier is all we…

The Paris Review’s offices are close to a small square of green space called Clement Clarke Moore Park, at West Twenty-Second and Tenth Avenue. Moore, a scholar and theologian, owned the piece of land—he donated a large part to the General Theol…

When my grandmother was alive, she would make rum balls every Christmas. Hers were the standard heavyweight confection: Nilla wafer crumbs and pulverized nuts, mixed with cocoa and bound with corn syrup and raw rum, then rolled into truffle-like sphe…

It may be “better” to give than to receive, but for some of us, it’s also easier. To give is to retain some measure of control, even power, in the dynamic; one who gives does not need to worry about expressing enthusiasm or responding in kind o…

As you ramble on through life, brother,
Whatever be your goal,
Keep your eye upon the doughnut,
And not upon the hole. This “Optimist’s Creed” could be read from the thirties through the seventies on every box of Mayflower Donuts, and on the wall…

More and more I enjoy seeing the herds go home at sunset or a little before—I amuse myself studying the faces of the cows and there are so many different expressions on them: the intellectual cow, the woman’s rights (or rather the cow’s rights…

One of the least endearing human verbal quirks is the “true story.” You know the drill: someone is telling some anecdote and at the end, the raconteur pauses dramatically and says, “True story.” In every single case, you’d had no reason to …

 “Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action’.” ―Ian Fleming, GoldfingerIn kindergarten, no one but Michael L. had actually seen a James Bond film. (Michael L., as opposed to…

For centuries, the lights of the Hanukkah menorah have inspired hope and courage. They may have also been responsible for inspiring then–General George Washington to forge on when everything looked bleak when his cold and hungry Continental Army ca…

Here at the Review, we don’t run a “gift guide,” as such—though we do have our special holiday offers. Even so, I’m here to solve all your holiday present questions. I’m out of ideas! You say. What do I do? Where do I go? How do I live? A…

There was this shop in the neighborhood where I’d sometimes go. It was a good spot to find inexpensive gifts: small vases, lacquered boxes, a decorative dish where you could leave your spare change—noncommittal things just north of impersonal. I…

If you haven’t seen High School Confidential, a 1958 cult classic, then do so at once. But if you’ve only got a few minutes, do yourself a favor and watch the “beat poetry” scene, one of the squarest drags you’ve ever seen, cats. (And much le…

 A large rat crossed my path last night on Fifty-seventh Street. It came out from under a wooden fence at a vacant lot near Bendel’s, paused for traffic, and then streaked across to the uptown sidewalk, sat awhile in the dark, and vanished. It was …

There have been many theories advanced about the accents of Alaskan Bush People’s Brown children. These theories often involve chicanery and sometimes speech impediments. Personally, when I first watched an episode of the controversial Discovery rea…

  The flies have conquered the flypaper. —John SteinbeckThe thing about a flyswatter is, there’s a limited number of places you can effectively wield it. Sure, it’s easy enough to whisk the swatter and even to make contact with your target—b…

Should you visit Google today, you’ll find that the daily “doodle” commemorates the birthday of Lucy Maud Montgomery, born November 30, 1874. The animation portrays Montgomery’s most famous creation, the red-haired Anne-with-an-e Shirley, turning gre…

This vintage video from the U.S. Department of Agriculture actually gives a very good primer on carving—frankly, it’s the best guide I’ve found, and the thigh-meat trick is indeed neat, even if the announcer’s chummy tone can grate. (Be sure…

The other day, I invented the worst game ever. It all started in the supermarket when I passed the processed cheeses. Velveeta, I read. Then, somehow, I found myself thinking, Velveeta, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Vel-vee-ta…

I recently had a thought while reading Marjory Hall’s A Picnic for Judy, a YA book from 1955. The premise was promising: a young woman is forced to move with her family to a rambling old inn on a Maine island. Score! I thought. It seemed like it woul…

While I was paying for a jute doormat, the salesman asked me if I’d like to make a donation toward some children’s charity.“Uh, sure,” I said. “Two dollars?”He suddenly produced a string of jingle bells and started pealing it jubilantly. …

In the past week, I’ve downloaded a guided meditation app, bought a new album I’d been looking forward to, and let several worthy podcasts pile up in my queue. And yet, the only thing I find myself listening to is “Skylark,” the 1942 standard…

These days I’m not really one for flash mobs, ubiquitous improv, or other anodyne, faux-spontaneous acts of pranking and merrymaking. I mean, you do you—I’ll be over here, surly and unwacky. I think it’s because a part of me knows I could hav…

Many years ago, on a family vacation in another country, we took an English-language tour of a medieval university. The group saw the antique telescopes and charts used by famous astronomers, and the stone-floored laboratories where philosophers had …

Over the weekend, I found myself picking up Elliot Paul’s 1942 memoir of prewar Montmartre, The Last Time I Saw Paris. (It must have been a gift from my grandfather; at any rate, it’s a discard from the Salinas Public Library.) A novelist, journali…

Plenty of hotels around the world feature libraries, or aspire to various bookish overtones—rooms named after different writers, curated volumes in each suite. But most of these spots have, you know, something else going for them, like pools or coc…

“It’s weird,” my brother, Charlie, said. “Lately a lot of my friends have been talking about learning things about their parents.”“You mean, secrets?” said my mother. It was her birthday; we were having lunch. “No, just facts they ha…

Early in 2016, New Directions will publish All the Poems, the complete works of Stevie Smith. Smith’s poetry—which Diane Mehta called “playful” and “carnivalesque” even as she acknowledged the elliptical voice’s “uncertain likeability…

“Have you been doing anything you shouldn’t, William Carlos Williams?” asks the venerable women’s-hour host Mary McBride. “Writing for forty years!” replies the poet with alarming jocularity. “That’s a nefarious business, you know!…

I am between books. It’s a very uncomfortable place to be. On the one hand, after finishing something good and thought provoking, you don’t necessarily want to move on too quickly—you want to digest and mourn the loss and crave the comfort of i…

After I wrote about Daphne du Maurier’s “Monte Verità” in September, a kind reader sent me a note:I wonder if du Maurier knew Daumal’s Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, also 1952 (in Fren…

It’s a bit hard to celebrate Bonfire Night stateside. The authorities are likely to put the kibosh on any and all roaring bonfires and vigilante firework displays. Plus, effigies strung up from trees and set alight are apt to be misinterpreted, esp…

Back in the bad old days, wags used to say the streets of Alphabet City stood, from west to east, for Adventurous, Bold, Crazy, and Dead. I’ve long thought that we need a similar system for categorizing the different hours at which one wakes up. I …

There is very little that can embellish the central fact of this clip: Gore Vidal discusses the South with Eudora Welty. Oh, wait, there’s one thing. Gore Vidal says the words “Kentucky Fried Chicken” and “McDonald’s” at 2:39, and it soun…

I have friends who rhapsodize about their new relationships with unabashed stars in their eyes. “How’s it going?” you ask a few weeks later, only to be told, “Oh—he was a sociopath!” Then you listen as your friend eviscerates this former …

There’s always the temptation, when recommending anything, to go only for the deep cuts. It’s true that Robert Aickman wrote several volumes’ worth of “strange stories,” many of them very good. It’s also true that “Ringing the Changes,” from 1964’s D…

Before there was trick-or-treating, there was souling. The UK version of the practice—in which beggars and children went door-to-door seeking alms and soul cakes in exchange for prayers—likely evolved from the pagan mumming rites of Samhain, the …

Strange as it seems now, there was a time when I was responsible for writing a best- and worst-dressed list. I had no qualifications, I felt uncomfortable doing it, and I admired extravagantly those celebrities who had the gall to flout convention an…

 The British call it Brick Lit: that genre of travel literature in which a sophisticatedly jaded man, woman, or couple falls in love with a crumbling farmhouse in some exotic, rural locale and in the comic struggle to restore said farmhouse, and via …

I watched the 1972 film adaptation of Play It As It Lays the other day; the whole movie is streaming on YouTube for free now. I wanted to reject it outright because its mood was not exactly the same as the novel’s—the quality of the bleakness wa…

A friend drew my attention to a news story. It concerned the German-born footballer Bastian Schweinsteiger and his lawsuit against a Chinese company. It seems the company, Dragon in Dream, is selling a doll that bears a more than passing resemblance…

You’d be forgiven for thinking I’ve lately fallen down some peculiar Bloomsbury Group rabbit hole. And you wouldn’t be wrong. While I was in London last month—and, incidentally, beginning my own marriage—I reread Nigel Nicolson’s classic Portrait of …

Sarah Jessica Parker, the actress and shoe designer, has named a shoe after Donna Tartt, the writer. The Tartt is a glittery Mary Jane with a chunky low heel. The color is called Scintillate. It retails for $385 and sold out within hours on NeimanMar…

It’s no great shock that Leonard Woolf was recorded on film, not when you think about it—after all, the writer, publisher, and widower of Virginia lived into 1969.And yet! And yet! It seems somehow magical that here he should be, modern and in co…

 I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters:
To you they have show’d some truth. —MacbethIn the Austin airport, there is an ad for a major national bank. “You keep it weird,” it says. “We’ll keep your rates low.” (Okay, so I’m paraphra…

 You couldn’t really see out of that big head, so you’d feel someone on your leg but you couldn’t see it, and I’d have to turn my whole body and hold the head to look down—it was a little rough. Later on, I often wondered what happened to M…

The other night, we had the chance to see the Mets play the Dodgers. In an effort to rally the team, the jumbotron repeatedly blared that “Everybody clap your HANDS!” command—accompanied at Citi Field by a graphic of Mr. Met leading the chee…

Back when the world was new and there weren’t three Sadies in every kindergarten class, I worshipped the Lillian Vernon catalog. My love for the mail-order tome was purely theoretical; although it arrived in the mailbox regularly, we never ordered …

 She said that my good qualities were my bad qualities—this I have come to realize is true of everyone. On the one hand, I was game, eager and perfectly ready to see what was in front of me. On the other hand, I had no sense of direction or destiny…

I love being read to. I could pretend it’s because it takes my mind away when I have a migraine or because it allows one to appreciate the aural poetry of writing—and that would be partially true. But the appeal is more elemental, more regressive…

Contrary to popular wisdom, in my experience many of the best comebacks are not cutting. L’esprit d’escalier is all well and good, but take it from me, zingers aren’t what they’re cracked up to be: when you grow up in a family that fights alm…

Some years ago, a friend who works in real estate let me see the Greenwich Village apartment that had belonged to John Barrymore; I had read about it and was thrilled to see the interior. Today its rent is beyond the reach of most mortals, but even w…

I used to have a superpower. I never told anyone, of course—that’s the rule with powers—and in the grand tradition, it was a mixed blessing. It was this: mothers loved me.It’s true. Mothers of all kinds wanted me to date their sons. Hell, the…

“A language is not complete if there are no translations of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Alice in Wonderland,” the translator Tiny Mulder wrote in 1962. Would that it were so easy! The Grolier Club’s current exhibition is called “Alice in a Wor…

By 1967, the Everly Brothers’ career was on the wane, their many hits a distant memory. Both Don and Phil Everly were addicted to amphetamines, and their relationship was (perhaps not incidentally) fraying. Although some of their later work is great—…

There is a part early in Georgette Heyer’s The Grand Sophy in which the eponymous heroine is told that “there are more important things to think of than one’s dresses.” To which the redoutable Sophy replies, “What a stupid thing to say! Natur…

Television Land (not to be confused with the ever-sadder TV Land) is a foreign country: they do things differently there. The residents get very excited about fast food. Dads are childish buffoons and moms are smug scolds. All kids are bratty smart a…

In the hours before the lunar eclipse, my husband and I were in one of those nightmarish, mammoth craft stores—shopping for some vellum, as one does—and I began to sing along with Dion’s cover of Del Shannon’s “Runaway.” I sing a lot, and with great …

Last time I went to the Grand Central Oyster Bar for a quick pre-train chowder, there was a particularly large group of Italian tourists blocking the door. I couldn’t understand their guide’s monologue, but I could only assume she was instructing…

Dorothy Parker is said to have been the author of one of the best quotes in history: “Eternity is a ham and two people.” Like many such quips, it’s hard to find the original source—although in this case, we can safely assume that life was certainly …

Last week, we finally took the jacket and the boots to be repaired. I bought the jacket and the boots about ten years ago, and they were already a good thirty years old by then. For a long time now, the lining of the jacket has been so tattered it’…

I was asked recently to write about my favorite love song, and I debated what to say. It wasn’t that I didn’t know which song to pick. I did. But I knew it was a weird choice.There are many songs that are almost too painfully emotive to listen to…

Little did you know, when you woke up today on this rather ordinary Tuesday, that a treat awaited you. I speak, of course, of the above clip, in which Evelyn Waugh critiques modernism.No one ever made the mistake of confusing the Waugh of the 1950s w…

 Life is an onion—you peel it year by year and sometimes cry. ―Carl SandburgHere’s a practical writing tip: if you’re stuck, write “Once upon a time.” Go on, try it—I think you’ll find that even the action is soothing. It’s not jus…

When we got married, my husband and I knew we didn’t want to do anything elaborate: we had neither the money nor the inclination and, in any case, we wanted to get the wedding over with and begin the marriage. (Proper weddings, as any bridal magazi…

 Those who go to the mountains must give everything. That’s all there is to it. —Daphne du Maurier, “Monte Verità”Everest is opening in theaters across the country, bringing with it much CGI, apparently stunning vistas, and the sort of relaxation tha…

The British Pathé newsreel series Personality is fascinating. Each consists of clips of the “home life” of a British celebrity of the 1940s or 1950s: artists, actors, musicians. We see them romping with dogs or wandering on lawns or, in the case…

Once upon a time, a newly married couple rode an old train from Myrdal to Flåm. The train passed through mountains and valleys, past waterfalls and vast lakes. Often the climb was dramatically steep, the hairpin turns almost impossibly sharp. The p…

I’m a little too old, I think, to know how to really waste time on the Internet. I do it, of course, but I don’t think I do it properly: I tend to stay in my rut, visiting the same couple of sites every time, answering the same set of questions. Has …

Last November, my brother and I went out with my mother for her birthday dinner. It was a special birthday—she was becoming a senior citizen—so we went somewhere nice, where the waiter told us that it was the start of scallop season and the sweet…

I was surprised and touched, when I returned from a two-week trip, to find that a loaf of Wonder Bread had grown a furry cloak of blue-green mold. I’d cleaned out the fridge before we left, regretfully tossing out half-and-half dregs and old half c…

About an hour into the boat ride, I went below deck to buy two cups of hot chocolate. It was chilly and I hadn’t dressed warmly enough, but I didn’t want to miss anything.The fjord was unearthly beautiful. It felt counterproductive in every way t…

“My mother killed herself on the first day of spring.” That’s the first line of Hesper Anderson’s memoir, South Mountain Road: A Daughter’s Journey of Discovery. Please persevere. And don’t be put off by the subtitle—even if the squishy word “j…

One of my “parlor tricks,” if such you can call it, used to be performing the Kurt Weill standard “September Song” in the voice of Lotte Lenya. I can’t pretend anyone ever requested this, per se, but from the ages of fifteen to about twenty-one, I br…

“A 1907 page-turner about American heiresses marrying impoverished, effete English aristocrats,” reads the description affixed to the shelf below The Shuttle. Obviously, I want to read it. And obviously, this is the work of Persephone Books.You don…

I was delighted, at a London bookshop, to encounter a recent reissue of the 1954 Ethelind Fearon manual The Reluctant Hostess. As far as I’m concerned, Fearon’s entire oeuvre should be in print always, regardless of commercial considerations. She…

 What hath night to do with sleep? ―John Milton, Paradise LostOne of the cruelest and most arbitrary displays of grown-up power has always seemed to me our approach to jet lag. Post red-eye, a child is diminished and cranky and disoriented. Almost si…

In 1932, an Irish popular songwriter named Jimmy Kennedy penned one of the most sinister sets of lyrics ever composed. Kennedy—who had already had Tin Pan Alley success with numbers like “Barmaids Song” and “Red Sails in the Sunset.” Later,…

Because my neighbors were out of town, I had been offered the gift of their weekly fruit and vegetable share from Community Share Agriculture. And because they are a family of four, when I came home from the nearby church where the produce is distrib…

Whenever you hear about the death of another specialty bookstore—RIP Mystery Bookstore! RIP Cookbook Store!—walk over to that unlikeliest bastion of hope, West 40th Street, and breathe a sigh of relief: the Drama Book Shop abides. And it’s not …

The other day, I stopped to give myself a talking-to. I’m worried about you, I said sternly. Your constant outrage is not healthy, and all these self-righteous interventions with strangers are completely out of control. I didn’t want to be the on…

Over the weekend, I was attracted by the cover of a 1940s pulp paperback for sale on upper Broadway. The book was called Curtains for the Editor, and featured a bleeding body sprawled over a giant manuscript, so obviously I was sold before I’d even…

 Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story. —E. A. PoeWith time to kill before my train, I moseyed into the New York Transit Museum’s shop at Grand Central Station. A train-mad little boy was going wild, and a…

I dislike the term hangry, a neologism conflating hungry and angry and thus describing the rage induced by hunger. Like PMS, it seems to conveniently dismiss any legitimate anger that may arise in the course of a blood-sugar crash. And for those of u…

Why lie? I first picked up Colleen Moore’s 1968 autobiography, Silent Star, because I wanted to read about the dollhouse. Yes, Moore is a pivotal figure in early Hollywood. Yes, Flaming Youth is considered one of the defining pieces of flapper cultur…

 It is always the unreadable that occurs. —Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying People toss around the word unreadable a lot—invariably about something they have, by definition, read, at least in part. By “people,” I specifically mean people who rea…

Cooking, as we know, is a constant test of character. It’s easy to pretend we’re all attracted to the high-minded ideals of fostering community, continuing traditions, and feeding souls. But catering for others is often competitive—even if the …

On an uptown local train during the height of an August rush hour, an old man fell asleep in his seat. It should be said that the man in question probably believed his music was contained; he was wearing earbuds. But either he’d neglected to proper…

In his late twenties, my father was a habitué of the Charles Hamilton Autograph Auctions at New York’s Waldorf Astoria, where he would snap up anything that went unsold at the end of the day; in this way he earned the nickname The Vulture. Charles…

In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class; every hour …

Somewhere in the world, there must be people who actually take a moment to unsubscribe from all those e-mails—newsletters and sale alerts and publicity blasts—that clutter their inboxes. Rather, I mean, than simply deleting them every single day.…

The veneer of civility is always thin on a red-eye. But somehow, at the airport, it seemed that the news playing on the screen overhead—the shootings, the civil unrest, the human tragedy—had forced some perspective on this particular group. Or so…

If I hate anything that smacks of “self-care”—and I do—I come by this antipathy honestly. I don’t just mean my mother’s disdain, bordering on pathological, for any sort of pampering. I’ve come to see this trait of hers as equal parts pu…

Here is a partial list of things to dread about spa treatments: Getting lost in a locker room and wandering into a broom closet. Sitting around in white in a waiting room with a bunch of other people in white, looking like a group of Latter-Day Saint…

The Broadway Melody of 1929 won the Oscar for best picture. The highest-grossing film of the year, it was the first all-talk musical, and MGM’s first musical, period. It contained a groundbreaking Technicolor sequence.Even if you’re not a cinephi…

It has been a bad summer for the iconic characters of Southern literature. A couple of weeks ago, a New Hampshire man named Huckleberry Finn was accused of rape. This was surely not what his parents had in mind when they named him.When the world lear…

One soon learns the point of a modern honeymoon. In this day and age, when most couples don’t need the time to become acquainted, it can seem like pure indulgence: a well-earned rest after the interpersonal stresses of wedding planning, and the rar…

Here are the things you hear most often when you announce plans to marry someone who happens to have the same last name:That’s convenient!Guess you won’t have to change your name!Are you changing your name?Is he taking your name?Are you hyphenati…

There are certain unpleasant life experiences that are not palliated by the fact that you know that they’re meaningless. I am speaking here of something specific: the particular horror of being pressured into spending money on things you know you d…

 They lived at opposite ends of a large apartment building near the harbor, and between their studios lay the attic, an impersonal no-man’s land of tall corridors with locked plank doors on either side. Mari liked wandering across the attic; it dre…

Years ago, an old boyfriend of mine had an academic colleague. One day, he said, “Language informs consciousness—we know this.”We found this sentence so hilarious that we incorporated it into our lives. Whenever either of us was being didactic …

My mother called me to ask how much to tip on a haircut. “A normal haircut,” she said.“I usually tip upwards of 20 percent,” I said, “but of course it’s at your discretion.”“That seems awfully high.”“I don’t know, not for somet…

In the moment, it was hard even for those of us steps away to know what had happened. A bicycle, a school bus, an improbably loud collision, a figure thrown clear, screeching brakes. Then we were all running and calling 911 at once, as if this one mo…

I phoned my dad. I was eager to discuss the recent cover story on a New York City tabloid. It featured a homeless man who lives in my neighborhood, and I was indignant on his behalf. I knew my dad would have read the piece closely and would have stro…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in the Monday-through-Wednesday crossword world, ELO is the most listened-to band in history, Ava the most popular girls’ name, and time divides into eras and eons. Think of it as the blue-plate specia…

Since moving to a neighborhood with a rapidly aging population, it has been my observation that old people enjoy going to the bank. While banking is, for most of us, a necessary ordeal, it’s also easy to see the appeal for someone isolated: you ge…

In The Parent Trap—and the German book, Das doppelte Lottchen, on which it’s based—two strangers arrive at a girls’ summer camp only to discover they are identical. “The nerve of her! Coming here with your face!” exclaims one roommate in th…

It is nice when people offer to help and mean it. But I was sincere, too, when I said that no, I didn’t need help cooking the eggs. That it was a one-man job.It’s true, I could have told him what to do. I could have instructed him to cover the eg…

Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that gro…

While walking near Lincoln Center, I was waylaid by a frantic-looking young man. I was discombobulated—I’d been deep in a meretricious podcast—and it took me a moment to get the buds out of my ears. He had to repeat what he’d been saying.“O…

You can tell who has lived in my building for a while by their elevator behavior. Anyone who’s spent any time in that unreliable apparatus knows it to be molasses slow, and that there is a significant interval between the stop and the opening of th…

There is a coffee shop in my neighborhood called the Sensuous Bean. This is obviously a great name, and perhaps one key to the store’s longevity; it’s one of the few small businesses in the area to have lasted over thirty years. I think it’s to…

There are folks out there who enjoy shopping for hiking shoes. These people love researching the flexibility of EVA midsoles, fingering crampon fittings, debating the merits of lug patterns and heel brakes with knowledgeable salespeople. When they wa…

  “Last night I had a dream”—there are few sentences more ominous. And not in an interesting way, either, although people seem to think listening to dreams is the sort of thing friends are happy—nay, obligated—to do, like helping them mo…

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten. —D. H. Lawrence Have you, a modern person, ever really smelled a rotten egg? Think hard! In all honesty, I can’t…

I hate the term “writer’s block.” First cited in the OED in 1950—plain old block was in use as early as ‘31—it feels like a dismissive term for a whole host of terrifying phenomena. Besides, if you write, the concept is scary: to acknowledge its …

At the airport, in a very long, very slow TSA security line, a friendly woman starts to talk. “This is bad,” she says. She travels a great deal for work. In Dubai, she tells us, “the bins come off a conveyor belt—you don’t have to do anyth…

On those occasions when I’ve taught, I’ve been struck by something: my students don’t seem to lie about what they’ve read. If you mention a book, and they haven’t read it—or even heard of it—they’ll admit to it without embarrassment, …

At a recent tag sale not far from my parents’ house, I came upon a thin, weathered paperback with a yellowing spine. It stuck out amid the other glossy hardcovers. The cover portrayed a stylized, vaguely Art Nouveau couple embracing passionately; a…

Long before museums were pandering to callow visitors bearing selfie sticks, they were trying to attract young people the old-fashioned way. Any big collection worth its salt has had some sort of children’s guide for decades now: museums encourage …

Like many small children, my brother was an accomplished con artist. And as is often the case with little boys, his manipulations were most effective when applied to his mother. I can particularly recall one bit of business he’d pull between the ag…

Christopher Robin Milne’s first two memoirs, The Enchanted Places and The Path Through the Trees, are in the canon of great ambivalence books. Perhaps you’ve read that Christopher Robin, as A. A. Milne’s son and muse, grew to loathe his fame and …

The other night, as part of their Sterling Hayden festival, Turner Classic Movies aired the 1953 film So Big, an adaptation of Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer-winning epic of the same name. The movie, like its source, chronicles the struggles of a determin…

One morning, I stopped by a Greenwich Village kiosk to buy a newspaper for my commute. When I would’ve walked away, the vendor’s voice stopped me, and I looked up to meet merry, twinkling eyes. “You,” he said roguishly, “are the most beauti…

Last night, I discovered a portal to another time and place—specifically, Hyde Park, Chicago, in June 2000. I hadn’t meant to, but when I opened a new tube of peppermint foot cream, there I was. The smell had transported me.Like all sense memory,…

Readers of this space know that I’ve recently devoted an unprofitable amount of time to puzzling over the underlined passages of a secondhand copy of Sally Quinn’s guide to entertaining, The Party, notorious when it was first published in 1997. My qu…

Not long ago, I picked up a fifty-cent copy of Sally Quinn’s The Party: A Guide to Adventurous Entertaining from a street vendor. I was interested enough by the beltway gossip and tales of DC hostesses and the faint whiff of notoriety that still eman…

Raise a tiny plastic goblet, please, to Playmobil’s founder Horst Brandstaetter, who has died at eighty-one. Brandstaetter, who was apparently known as “Herr Playmobil,” joined the family company in 1952, but it wasn’t until the seventies—…

“Why are narcissists always talking about how busy they are?” my friend wondered as we left the party. At this party, a certain narcissist had been droning on about how much she had to do; how she really shouldn’t be there; that she would be le…

Readers of the New York Times may have noticed a recent story about a new Czech reality show. In the tradition of Victorian House and other total-immersion programs, this one sticks modern people in another time—specifically a 1939 “remote mounta…

I hate the summer. I hate the heat, I hate the humidity, I hate the pressure to have fun, I hate the sand-in-an-hourglass frenzy of it all. I hate summer movies and the crowds of people at outdoor events. I do like the tomatoes. But ever since it daw…

The other day, I mentioned my grandfather’s fondness for a certain line of poetry: “Hie me away to the woodland stream,” he would say whenever the brook in the nearby woods was running.We walked that way almost every day on my visits to Califor…

I was settled with my papers, my coffee, and a cheese Danish at a bench on a Manhattan traffic island when someone sat down next to me. I glanced up and recognized a now-familiar face. It was the same elderly man I’d first seen in a local supermark…

It’ll be just lovely for you to play—it’ll be so hard. And there’s so much more fun when it is hard!
―Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna As regular readers of this space know, I try to see the silver linings in things. The other day, I was Pollyanna-in…

And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays;
Whether we look, or whether we listen,
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten ...
―James Russell Lowel…

It’s impossible to be completely happy when you have no appetite—or when you’re sated. People talk about the contentment that comes with a full belly, but to the food lover, this seems paradoxical. After all, if you are of the sort who lives to…

“Do you realize,” my friend Susannah said to me, “that we’re getting too old to be precocious?” This was at the start of the sixth grade. Susannah was, in fact, very precocious: politically minded, she had styled herself as an outspoken fem…

In her essay “Yellowstone Park,” collected in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy describes a friend: In school she had the name of being fast, which was based partly on her clothes and partly on the direct stare of her reddish-brown ey…

Yesterday, I was walking down the street, enjoying the warm weather and the city’s relative emptiness—a lot of people had gone away for the long weekend—when I saw someone who looked familiar, an old man on a bench outside an empty asphalt play…

Last night, as part of the Norwegian-American Literary Festival, four Norwegian writers—Gunnhild Øyehaug, Lars Petter Sveen, Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold, and Carl Frode Tiller—spoke at New York’s 192 Books. James Wood, who moderated, asked them t…

A young friend recently asked me if I had an old graduation gown she could wear for a third-grade play in which she was playing a Supreme Court Justice. I keep many of my old things and have a pretty decent dress-up chest at this point; I’ve helped…

I have often said that I wish I had invented blue jeans: the most spectacular, the most practical, the most relaxed and nonchalant. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity—all I hope for in my clothes. ―Yves Saint Laurent Thi…

I was anxious about the doctor’s appointment. Not because I thought there was anything much wrong with me, but because I knew they’d want to do “blood work” as part of the “workup,” and that the moment they brought out that thing they u…

Your Monday needs something. But what? Could it be … a 1974 clip of Orson Welles reminiscing about his “friendship” with Ernest Hemingway? It has everything: titanic ego-clashing, disingenuous concern-trolling, bullfighting, damning with fain…

In 1992, Eric Clapton released an acoustic version of his 1970 Derek and the Dominos classic, “Layla.” Inspired by the Persian epic The Story of Layla and Majnun—and, of course, by Clapton’s personal life—the original was ubiquitous at the height…

Today marks the anniversary of the 1925 publication of Mrs. Dalloway. The stream-of-consciousness novel has long been considered a modernist classic, perhaps the most accomplished work in Woolf's oeuvre—and though its elliptical prose and complex…

In middle school, my friend Marissa and I thought it was pretty darn hilarious to give each other the most inappropriate birthday cards possible. I don’t mean those pre-snark Shoebox greetings full of foul-mouthed grandmas; that would have been tan…

It’s galling to reach adulthood and realize how many things have gone over your head. That, in a single e-mail thread, you can learn both that “Staples” is a pun and that Chips Ahoy! is an allusion to “Ship ahoy.” I mean, you like to think that i…

One of the few remaining bastions of character on New York’s Upper West Side is its smattering of sidewalk booksellers. Up and down Broadway—displaying wares by American Apparel, blasting Bach, and hawking signed Roth novels in front of Zabar’s…

Back in 2011, I wrote a paean to my family’s one and only signature recipe: the wine cake. I hadn’t read it since it went up, and recently ran across the post while searching for a recipe for the cake; I was craving one for my own birthday. At …

Yesterday, after posting about the Edison Talking Doll, I was wracked with guilt. I could not believe that I, a lifelong defender of dolls, had turned on them so callously, joining the chorus of ignorant fear-mongering that contributes to the current…

Even doll partisans—those of us who defend doll life from slander and prejudice and unfair film portrayals—have to admit that they’re sometimes terrifying. Indeed, I think it would be fair to say that the Edison Talking Doll is one of the scari…

My mother’s loathing for the word lady occupies a special place in her pantheon of negativity. To be specific, she doesn’t actually mind lady as a word or a title of the peerage—as seen in, say, Lady Day*, The Lady Vanishes, or Lady Chatterley’s L…

Nothing can make you feel older than thrift shopping. As you walk the aisles, thumbing through the racks, young you keeps up a running monologue: That 1940s square-dancing outfit is cool! Look at those Polynesian-print slacks and the matching vest! Y…

The other day, I received the sweetest note from an old neighbor of my family’s commenting on the beauty of spring in the town where I grew up. She recalled something I’d done many years ago: “The first year I lived here, you walked up and down…

Let’s say you’re going about your day, footloose and fancy-free. Let’s say a friend e-mails you. “I’m so sorry,” she writes. “I’m really not feeling well. Can we reschedule?” It comes back to you in a rush: the long-ago volley of e…

If you look at the trending hashtag #WorldDreamin6Words you’ll see such tweets as: “Less ‘Them’ and ‘They’, more Us.” And “No More Violence in the Streets.” And “Self love and acceptance for all.” And “Ending the Stigma on M…

“That parrot,” he said at last. “You know something? It had me completely fooled when I first saw it through the window. I could have sworn it was alive.” “Alas, no longer.” “It’s most terribly clever the way it’s been done,” he s…

Urban life is full of glorious opportunities to hear people talking to themselves. I don’t mean mentally ill people; it doesn’t delight me to see somebody visibly ill. No, what I mean is the triumph of unself-consciousness that you can regularly …

For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multipli…

“GET THE HELL OUT OF MY FACE!” the woman screamed. My companion and I both turned around in alarm as we all mounted the escalator to the movie theater. “Oh, sorry! Not you!” she apologized hurriedly. “I was just telling a story to my frien…

In the age of the List, comparing editions of Lolita has become a national pastime. (That may be overstating the case. But there are at least two such lists in existence.) But I hasten to say: this is not mere hackery! Or, if it is, it is a sort o…

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars. —Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear” topped the charts for seven weeks i…

It can be exhausting, avoiding collusion. Jerks are always trying to make you complicit in their entitlement. You know what I’m talking about. Someone, say, yells at a bartender. Then he looks around trying to enlist allies. Can you believe this g…

Early in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, the narrator, Charles Arrowby, explains why he never learned to drive and prefers to be a passenger. “Why keep bitches and bark yourself?” he asks, with impeachable logic.  In the course of the novel, h…

Today I witnessed something special: a rare meeting of macaron and macaroon. Appropriately enough, the summit took place over international waters, between Paris and New York. The tension on the plane was palpable. The macaron was raspberry; it carr…

Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content. But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life. ―Sun Tzu, The Art of War I’m very prone t…

Before today, I’d never done my citizen’s duty by reporting a suspicious package to authorities. I guess I’d never seen anything suspicious enough. And in a place like New York, the bystander effect sometimes doesn’t seem to obtain—even if you did se…

“Personal pride does not end with noble blood. It leads people to a fond value of their persons, especially if they have any pretense to shape or beauty. Some are so taken with themselves it would seem that nothing else deserved their attention.”…

At what age does one outgrow the belief that a new coat will change one’s life? The belief that somehow, the you who wears this costume will grow worthy of it, will stride around a rosy future with a different sound track entirely? Plenty of garmen…

Around 1963, my dad was in a summer-camp production of Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. He played M. Martin. Sometimes, decades later, he would quote from it to my brother and I. We know from theatre of the absurd, but we thought the bizarre dialog…

Sometime in the third grade, a girl in my class began to claim she was ambidextrous. Previously, this girl had said she wanted to be a marine biologist. She also claimed to have athlete’s foot. This girl was a pretentious liar. In fairness, mari…

Reading about the parties of decades past, it sometimes seems they were all similar, and all awful—or at least that they had an intolerably high jerk quotient. Think of the celebrations in Cheever novels, or O’Hara stories: full of jerks, everyon…

You can learn a lot about modern mores and attitudes toward sexuality just by hanging out in the lobby of the Time Warner Center, the upscale mall at New York’s Columbus Circle. Watch how many passersby touch the tiny penis of Adam, the twelve-foot B…

This item was in Page Six yesterday:  The world’s largest black truffle landed in Manhattan this week—and to the extreme agony of many chefs and gourmands, it may not be up for sale or eating. The 5.5-pound truffle was guest of honor at a di…

The variable nature of April weather has long made it fodder for poets. (Or for poets in temperate climates, at any rate.) If you’ve come into contact with any choral pieces in your time, chances are you’ve come across this Thomas Morley pastoral…

The introduction of The Paris Review for Young Readers seems like a good time to think about one of its predecessors: St. Nicholas Magazine, which was published from 1873 to 1940. Though it wasn’t the only children’s magazine of its time, during …

Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and ins…

To love classic children’s books is to love heroines with literary ambitions. Harriet the Spy, Betsy Ray, Anne Shirley, Jo March—so many beloved characters wanted to be writers at a time when their sex and circumstances made that hope seem remote…

It made headlines last year when word got out that Terry Gilliam would finally resume work on his windmill-tilting Don Quixote—and cineastes speak with awe of Orson Welles’s unfinished 1955 Quixote. But there’s one Quixote adaptation that no one talk…

First, a general note: At what point do we stop celebrating the birthdays of the deceased? Yes, Robert Frost was born on this day in 1874, and yes, that would make him 141 today—had not death intervened in 1963, when, at eighty-eight, Frost had alr…

Let’s say you’ve had a long day, have a rare evening to yourself, and decide to treat yourself to dinner out. You sit at a restaurant bar with a good book, a glass of wine, your own company. You choose your meal, start to disappear into a story, …

The other day, I was riding down a Tucson highway with my mother. We had been to the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store and now it was rush hour. Suddenly, a man in a white pickup accelerated, passed us on the right, and screamed, “GET OUT OF THE FAS…

“If there’s a heaven,” my mom said recently, “I imagine it’s filled with brand-new Barbara Pym novels I’ve never read.”  There’s a particular desolation to finding you’ve reached the end of a beloved author’s body of work. Just …

“And what is the advantage your puppets would have over living dancers?” “The advantage? First of all a negative one, my friend: it would never be guilty of affectation. For affectation is seen, as you know, when the soul, or moving force,…

I’m not saying I smuggled a cheese ball through security and onto a domestic flight. That would be illegal, and I would never encourage anyone to break the law, by word or deed. Besides, only a total sociopath would have the hubris to boast of havi…

I remember a local TV commercial that was, by the standards of the day, pretty high-concept, if low budget. It advertised the services of an area veterinary clinic, and it portrayed two dogs on leashes, Muppet Babies–style (the viewer only ever saw t…

We live in the age of the Cake Wreck. Online, no confectionary disaster, no late-night slip of the icing tube, goes undetected or unmocked. It’s all in good fun, and at the end of the day, presumably most of the desserts still taste okay. Part of t…

Some claim that Anna Atkins—born on this day in 1799, in Kent—was the first woman to take a photograph. Others that hers were the first photos ever printed in book form. Atkins was a botanist, an artist, and an accomplished nature photographer. …

Even in its heyday, the Thirteen Club didn’t do much. While the society may have boasted five presidents among its (at any given moment) thirteen members, the fact that it could only meet when the calendar cooperated—the thirteenth—meant that …

In the 1960s, Stevie Smith had a resurgence in popularity. The counterculture had a penchant for taking up older eccentrics—Dr. Bronner, for instance—and when the youth came calling, Smith was ready. After years of relative obscurity, the poet co…

For something that inhibits creativity, depression inspires a lot of metaphors. You can read about it likened to a vine-covered house or a black dog or a dreary balloon, or see it portrayed as a lowering cloud. Maybe because it’s a state so charact…

When we have to change an opinion about any one, we charge heavily to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us. ―Friedrich Nietzsche I was riding a train the other day that came to a halt between stations.  After a few moments, there…

My grandfather liked to talk about how much uglier Americans used to be. “People were ugly!” he would say with relish. “You have no idea now!” As children, we would always try to refute his claims, citing examples of modern celebrities we considere…

Back when I was at my loneliest, I decided it would be a good idea to force myself to do all sorts of things alone. It’s not that I had an aversion to solitude: I’ve always enjoyed, for instance, dining solo, and I like watching movies without th…

Years ago, I lived with a roommate who worked as a temp at a now-defunct parenting magazine. While she was there, the magazine sponsored a cutest-baby contest, and she took to rescuing some of the nonwinning entrants from the trash—these were physi…

Many agree that our language is coarsening. We curse more, insult each other with impunity, and speak like illiterate cats on a regular basis. But in one way, things are improving: it’s been a good ten years since I heard anyone say “Guess you ha…

One day, when I was around fourteen, my dad was invited to a black-tie fund-raising dinner. And so he broke out the tuxedo my mom had found for him at the Salvation Army and clipped on his bow tie, and took the Metro-North into Manhattan. He returned…

“In like a lion, out like a lamb” has always seemed a straightforward enough proverb: when March starts, it’s still winter, and by the end of the month spring has begun. True, in many climates the weather hasn’t quite reached the lamb stage b…

“Increasingly rare is the scholar who braves ridicule to justify the art of Longfellow’s popular rhymings,” the critic Kermit Vanderbilt once wrote. One scholar of the human heart who’s never been accused of fearing ridicule is Neil Diamond.…

New York Review Children’s Classics has reissued so many wonderful forgotten texts: novels and picture books and nursery rhymes and even the occasional cookbook. But for my money, none is weirder than Dorothy Kunhardt’s 1933 Junket Is Nice. The prol…

If you’re not sick, you soon will be, and all the hand sanitizer in the world won’t save you. Everyone is a potential foe; no one wants to admit it. This morning on the subway, everyone was coughing and sneezing with varying degrees of discretion…

Warning: going down the Frank O'Hara reading rabbit hole can swallow your day. It’s not that the poet’s reading of Lunch Poems is such a revelation, by which I mean different from what you might have imagined in your head. Rather, he reads them exa…

Over the past several years, a series of reports have said that fewer medical students than ever are choosing to go into psychiatry. There are factors the authors generally cite: the wider availability of prescription drugs, the decline of analysis, …

In honor of the Metropolitan Museum’s birthday, I’d like to suggest a fun weekend read: Thomas Hoving’s Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hoving, who died in 2009, became the Met’s director in 1967, and in his decade-…

Like everyone else, I am weary of talking about the weather. But it’s not the banality of the talk that bothers me. Talking about weather is as endlessly fascinating as weather itself—even if, nowadays, conversations about the weather are no long…

Now “happy” is something extremely subjective. One of our sillier Zemblan proverbs says: the lost glove is happy. Promptly I refastened the catch of my briefcase and betook myself to another publisher. ―Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire Much of the USA …

When people know that one has a certain interest—say, dolls—they will very kindly send one stories that they think correspond to the subject. As a result, I’ve had brought to my attention everything from articles about Upper West Side doll-hoar…

Recently Gawker posted one of those irresistible lists of horrible celebrity encounters—tales of rudeness and jerkiness and shattered illusions and fallen idols. The moral, as ever, was: don’t meet your hero. Unless, of course, that hero is Miste…

Late last night I posted a picture of myself to a social media account. Not the most flattering picture, and a particularly ridiculous one: I’m standing in front of my bathroom mirror, phone clearly visible in my hand, and staring off at—what? Th…

Many people hate Valentine’s Day for its commercialism and general tawdriness. And even those of us who don’t—who might, say, have invested in boxes of conversation hearts, or bedecked their apartment doors with slightly crooked foil hearts fro…

In a nod to the recent Grammy Awards, allow me to pay tribute to a record that was nominated in 1963, in the category of Best Documentary or Spoken Word Recording (Other than Comedy). That record is Enoch Arden, Op. 38, TrV. 181, performed by Glenn…

Harper Lee fever has gripped the nation. Ever since news of her lost novel hit last week, the famously reclusive writer has been everywhere—trending on Twitter, spawning lists, smiling above the fold on the front page of today’s New York Times. Natur…

Here are some words to take into the weekend. I have been reading a lot of Elizabeth Bowen lately, prompted first by the gorgeous paperbacks recently reissued by the University of Chicago Press. She needs no praise from me; at her best, Bowen is as u…

Bernice stood on the curb and looked at the sign, Sevier Barber-Shop. It was a guillotine indeed, and the hangman was the first barber, who, attired in a white coat and smoking a cigarette, leaned non-chalantly against the first chair. He must have h…

The clue for 2 Down on today’s New York Times crossword is as follows: “ ‘If you ask me,’ in textspeak.” Spoiler alert: the answer is IMHO. (Short for “in my humble opinion” or “in my honest opinion,” for those who didn’t know.) T…

Here’s a phrase you don’t read much nowadays: brown study. First cited in the sixteenth century (specifically in a book called Dice-Play), the expression—which describes a state of intense, sometimes melancholy reverie—really seems to have hit it…

I’ve mentioned my building’s giveaway table in this space before. If you’re clearing your bookshelves, you can leave just about any volume on the table and find it snapped up with gratifying alacrity. I’ve scavenged treasures aplenty there, …

No one ever heard my grandmother, in all her eighty-three years, utter a bad word. I can only once remember her even raising her voice. “It’s all fouled up!” she cried then, shaking a broken TV set. She said it with such frustration and despair tha…

As I wandered through the painkillers aisle, sniffling and throwing decongestants and tinctures into my basket, I thought that one of the annoying things about the common cold is the knowledge that it’s so benign. A harried-looking dad was bending …

Today, fans of the Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks store received a welcome e-mail. “Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks—MOVED!!” read the triumphant subject line. After being forced to leave its longtime home on West Tenth Street, and facing an uncertain fut…

One of the great sacrifices of adulthood is giving up shyness. Even if it’s been a defining characteristic since childhood, a constant companion through early life, at a certain point it is a luxury we cannot afford. So far as the world is concerne…

“Brrr! It’s cold!” I exclaimed the other day, because it was.  “Did you just say brrr?” my friend asked. “I did indeed.” “People don’t say that; they just write it.” “That’s not true. Do people say ow? Or ouch? Or achoo?”  “Yes. But they o…

At a certain point in the late nineties, my family’s living room needed to be rewired. It seemed the wiring had not been replaced since the house was first built. The hardware store sent up a very old man to tackle the job. I know because I was han…

’Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
     Since others it has ceased to move:
Yet, though I cannot be beloved,
               Still let me love! My days are in the yellow leaf;
     The flowers and fruits of Love are gone;
The worm—the canker, and t…

On this date in 1976, the Concorde started flying commercial passengers on London-Bahrain and Paris-Rio routes. For the next twenty-seven years, this fleet of turbojets would ferry the rich and famous betwixt glamorous world hubs with unprecedented s…

Lately, posters for the film Mortdecai have been popping up everywhere. They feature Johnny Depp and a battalion of costars extravagantly mustachioed and looking wacky. Oh, great, I thought. More of Johnny Depp pretending to be a character actor. Tha…

You know those moments when you feel like you’ve mastered adulthood? When you think, Wow, this is it—I’m on assignment in a city across the country, interviewing somebody interesting, wearing sunglasses. Someone who saw me now would totally think I w…

In the first half of the twentieth century, America experienced what might be called the “silly-hats craze.” Maybe it was the influence of the surrealists, who were by then commercialized and nonthreatening. Perhaps it was a spate of postwar friv…

We are told it is a liability to be thin-skinned, and it’s true that these are bad times for it. When an Internet slight makes you question your path in life, an encounter with a surly stranger results in canceled plans, and the day’s news derail…

Last night—or early this morning, I guess, around four A.M.—I woke up from a dream. I’d been reading a Hilary Mantel novel and watching red-carpet recaps before bed, and the two apparently melded in my brain in the most literal way imaginable. …

Not very long ago, family friends got in touch with me. Their son, Luke, was moving to New York for med school; it would be great if I’d see him and told him where to go in the city; he would be in touch. He was.  “This is three hours of my lif…

We have all heard the theories: OK is of Choctaw derivation, or possibly West African. Some linguists attribute it to the “comical misspellings” craze of the 1830s, while others cite Martin Van Buren’s Old Kinderhook campaign, or attempts to l…

Yesterday, amid the headlines and hashtags, the footage and pictures from Paris, came an e-mail. It was from a publicist. It reminded us that this month marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of War and Peace.  Well, sort of: the first inst…

There are many benefits to being a grown-up. Using stoves unsupervised, buying things online, enjoying herring. As children suspect, you can set your own bedtime; as adults know, this can be as early as you like.  One of the worst things—besides t…

In The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa refers to “that most absurd of emotions, retrospective jealousy.” He’s talking about sexual jealousy; in the way of new lovers, a young woman finds herself bitterly resenting her fiancé’s old …

One summer, a woman I know worked at a farm in the French countryside. I know this because I rented her Brooklyn apartment while she was gone, a massive space owned by a family of mysterious busybodies in a building filled with unsavory characters. M…

We’re out until January 5, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2014 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year!There were extenuating circumstances. I was in LA for work, and I had known, intellectually, that it w…

We’re out until January 5, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2014 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year!I moved to Greenpoint, in North Brooklyn, on the heels of a breakup, and although I lived there for ye…

The past, as we know, is another country, and from the age of four or so, I wished passionately for dual citizenship. What old-fashioned meant, I couldn’t even have told you. But for most of my early life I worshipped the idea devoutly. To me it me…

I was told not long ago that a certain prominent New York publication has put a moratorium on features about the death of local institutions; otherwise, they’d be running such features constantly. And the sad truth is, there is a sameness to the na…

“Do we need tea?” she echoed. “But Miss Lathbury … ” She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realise that my question had struck at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind. …

I like the arbitrary lists the Guardian often includes in its children’s book section: best villains in children’s books, best dogs, best mothers. As with all lists, these are made to be debated, and it’s always fun to see what the compiler cho…

There’s a human-interest story that’s been making the rounds on the “Weird But True” circuit lately. It concerns a restaurant in Chongqing, China, that gives diners discounts based on their weight. Upon entry, customers step onto a scale. As…

Two winters ago, I accidentally found myself in the East Village on the day of SantaCon. For those fortunate enough to have been spared it, this is an annual holiday event in which punters in Santa costumes (mere hats won't cut it) pay an entry fee t…

If you enter the New York Historical Society by its Seventy-Seventh Street side entrance, you’ll see before you a smallish chest: a time capsule, the plaque explains, created in 1914 by the Lower Wall Street Business Men’s Association. It was sup…

The Internet is filled with half truths, dead ends, and flat-out lies. But to my mind the single greatest disappointment is on YouTube: the video called “Mark Twain’s Voice.” I’ll admit, it’s interesting in its own right. (And it does lead …

Some books are made to be read aloud—or, at least, they take on different dimensions when they’re heard or performed. The texts that make for great audiobooks are sometimes the ones you’d expect: Ulysses or Moby-Dick or just about anything by Wodeho…

A few weeks ago, my mom called. This is not in itself unusual, and she had important news: she’d sighted the Barefoot Contessa and her husband on the self-checkout line at the supermarket. I was naturally interested, but I happened to be in the mid…

Today, the Oxford English Dictionary brings us a splendid word of the day: the little-used draffsack. Because we can always use alternatives to glutton.  Not that there’s anything wrong with glutton! Glutton is one of the finest of all words. It is …

There are a few things you need to understand about the particular grocery store I’m about to discuss. It’s part of a New York chain, but it is not what anyone would call a supermarket; it’s on the small side, for starters, with none of the sli…

Here’s a gift idea for you, suitable for children and arrested adults—which is to say, a large part of your Christmas list. Go online at once and buy several copies of McCall’s Giant Golden Make-it Book. Until recently, I had totally forgotten about…

Here’s a scene from Barbara Pym’s 1952 novel Excellent Women, in which the protagonist, Mildred Lathbury, meets Everard Bone’s eccentric mother. I thought I had better revive the conversation which had lapsed, so I commented on the animals’ he…

If, by any chance, you read the print edition of the Sunday New York Times, as I did around two in the morning, perhaps you, too, were arrested by the full-page advertisement on A23. 11-YEAR-OLD, TWIN ROCKERS, VITTORIO AND VINCENZO OF V² SWEEP LOS A…

As fans of holiday ephemera know, there are several primary genres of weird, old-timey Thanksgiving cards. There is the Greedy Child. There is the Doomed Turkey. There is the Turkey in Vehicle, which is sometimes a corncob car. There is the Anthropom…

Vernon Lee—the pen name of the English writer Violet Paget—was a travel writer, novelist, musician, and critic with a strong interest in aesthetics. One of the first to bring the concept of Einfühlung, or empathy, into English criticism, she was also…

You know how J. M. W. Turner tried to exhibit his work at the Royal Academy and the Royal Academy was all, Wow, your work is way too innovative and interesting and we can’t show it because it would threaten all our hidebound, bourgeois ideas and fo…

Migraines are the most glamorous of headaches. Mysterious, debilitating, unpredictable: they get all the press. Who wants to talk about the workaday irritation of a tension headache, the dull thud of dehydration, the queasy slosh of sinus infections?…

In my defense, I was really little when my mom took me to my first concert at a grown-up concert hall. The music was for children, but I was still too babyish; I demanded to leave in the middle of act I so I could pee. I have no memory of what we he…

If you never have, watch this 1964 episode of the BBC show Monitor, in which John Betjeman interviews Philip Larkin. It is twenty-four minutes well spent. There’s the poetry: Larkin reads “Here” and “A Study of Reading Habits” and “Toad…

According to legend, it was on November 18, 1307, that the Swiss patriot William Tell shot an apple off his son’s head. After refusing to pay homage to a Hapsburg liege, Tell was forced to submit to the test of marksmanship. Later, Tell killed the…

Once Upon a Potty was written in 1975 by the Israeli author and illustrator Alona Frankel to help her son toilet train. (Its Hebrew title is Sir Ha-Sirim, literally “Potty of Potties.”) Since it was translated into English in 1980, it’s never g…

While contemplating the purchase of a hot-cider doughnut at the aptly named Carpe Donut truck, one finds oneself thinking about food-truck names. Many have; it is one of the consolations of modernity that we live in the golden age of food-truck nome…

In the immortal words of Winston Churchill, “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”  Pollyanna Whittier would agree. The once popular novelist Eleanor H. Porter wrote the…

Recently, I was putting together a list of good food writers for a group of students. I didn’t have Robert Farrar Capon on the list, then I added him, then I removed him again. He seemed not just too religious, but too—specific, somehow. Capon, …

Little green army men—they don’t have a more specific name—are now in the National Toy Hall of Fame, which exists, in Rochester, and held its 2014 induction ceremonies last week. For those of you who have never played Marble War or seen any par…

In early April, Peter Matthiessen, the beloved cofounder of The Paris Review, died at eighty-six. Last week, I received an e-mail from my mother, containing a link to the following announcement: SAGAPONACK
THE ESTATE OF THE LATE
PETER MATTHIESSEN
REN…

Yesterday was very rainy and everyone was cranky. I was covertly trying to take shelter under the edge of a stranger’s golf umbrella while I crossed the street, when suddenly there was an outraged blast of honking horns and an explosion of profane …

I’ve always loved this line of Emily Dickinson’s: “November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.” Where did I first encounter it? Who knows—maybe a kid’s book of quotations or a calendar or something else. I know the context was ch…

The hard truth is that not everyone has a novel in them. “I have no gift for invention,” I say to anyone who ever asks after my own ambitions—and why do people ask? For that matter, is my response even appropriate? I’m not sure what that means, “…

Your typical polling center seldom evokes the poetic. In my neighborhood, we’re assigned a local elementary school. There are student projects lining the walls: family trees, doggerel, pictures. (“Children only!” a volunteer yelled at me when I…

If I need to, I can date my periods of depression by the corresponding enthusiasms for terrible TV shows. Enthusiasms is maybe the wrong word: let’s say commitment to. Now, at the best of times, I can be sucked into watching almost any show—give…

As we all know, the world divides, evenly or otherwise, between those of us who grew up reading In a Dark, Dark Room and those who did not. Those of us who have read it (I got my copy at one of those sponsored school book sales, noteworthy for its ba…

There is something profoundly lonely about sitting in a movie theater, watching something you know to be bad, while people around you enjoy it. I had such an experience recently: the movie had been rhapsodically reviewed, was as full and red a tomato…

If you’re looking for a crash course in prewar hilarity—or, indeed, in American gender dynamics—get yourself to the nearest used bookstore and pick up a copy of 1910’s Cupid’s Cyclopedia, “Compiled for Daniel Cupid by Oliver Herford and John Cecil …

Or, the hazards of wearing a Paris Review shirt.While I was shopping for milk, I felt a hand tap my shoulder. It was a lady of perhaps sixty, wearing arty jewelry. “Excuse me,” she said. “I was just wondering … are you from … Paris?” She …

One imagines that lots of Dylan Thomas devotees are marking his centenary by making a pilgrimage to the White Horse Tavern, where the dissolute poet famously downed those last fatal eighteen whiskeys. For their sake, we hope the White Horse is not th…

Perhaps you’ve read Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short stories, or the volumes of poetry she wrote (some with her partner, Valentine Ackland). Lolly Willowes, her best-known work, is a sly novel about a spinster who takes up witchcraft, and well worth se…

I had never used one of those Web sites in which you list an odd job and ordinary people vie to do it for you. The arrangement seems almost too good to be true. So when I was faced with a household repair, I decided to make a go of it: I started a pr…

Given the passionate nature of bibliophiles, the fanatical devotion of cat fanciers, and the obsessive tendencies of miniaturists, it only stands to reason that when the three join forces, it is to form the most powerful coalition in the world. (Or t…

I ran into the guy while I was taking a walk through what is now called the Columbia Waterfront District—but then, this was nearly ten years ago. “Excuse me, do you live around here?” he said. I thought he wanted directions, but it turned ou…

“I’ve never seen the point of New York,” someone said to me last week, in a foreign city, upon learning that it was my hometown. I must confess to being nonplussed by this. I hadn’t fielded such an idiotic remark since middle school. Back th…

You expect to feel humbled when you travel. Strange public transit, alien customs—add a language you don’t speak and it’s an immediately chastening experience. When the residents are so inured to your national arrogance and laziness that they d…

On November 21, 1811, the writer Heinrich von Kleist shot his beloved, the terminally ill Henriette Vogel, and then himself, on the banks of Kleiner Wannsee. The innkeeper who housed them the night before described the couple, thirty-four and thirty-…

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.
―Baruch Spinoza A little after nine, on the western outskirts of Berlin, we tried to find a bite. The…

One of the many things that dates my childhood firmly to the eighties and early nineties is the ubiquity of large reference books in it. Reference books, big ones, figure in most of my memories; I guess they were easy to find at tag sales. At any giv…

The following human-interest story ran recently on Metro UK: A grandmother who once hated the idea of swearing now turns the air blue after a stroke left her unable to control her potty mouth ... ‘Before I had a stroke I would still get annoyed…

To those of us who enjoy seeing movies alone, the practice does not require any defense; it’s one of life’s greatest pleasures. While—obviously—everyone likes seeing a film with a like-minded friend, and while some (The Room springs to mind) derive h…

There’s a new iteration of Annie opening this year, starring Quvenzhané Wallis as the plucky eponymous orphan. You’ve probably seen the 1982 movie; maybe you’ve caught one of the musical’s many revivals. And most everybody knows that the music…

Glass half full: whatever the travails of the publishing industry, we live in a wonderful era for reissues. Think about it! All of Barbara Pym and Barbara Comyns are in print! Muriel Spark is having a moment! You want A Girl in Winter or Maiden Voyag…

On October 3, 1849, a delirious Edgar Allan Poe was found in a Baltimore ditch dressed in clothes that were, reportedly, not his own. He died four days later at Washington Medical College. There are numerous theories, but the exact cause of death rem…

It is not often in this day and age that something falls through the Web. And yet, today, National Poetry Day, I wanted to share with you the text of my favorite childhood poem and found myself completely stymied. Not a trace of it exists. I even kn…

In Times Square, surrounded by embattled Elmos and superheroes, several of us stopped at the crosswalk to wait for the light to change. The blue font on the overhead news ticker looked so cartoonish, so sort of jolly, that it took a moment for the wo…

I have always planned to one day throw a big party and give everyone a survey at the door. Here is what it would say: Hi! My name is: _______________________ I know: ☐ The Host
☐ The Hostess
☐ I came with a friend
☐ I’m crashing I am from: _…

There are too many coffee clichés: nineties Seattle yuppies, current obsessives in Portland and Brooklyn, the enormous and always hilarious line of tchotchkes that emphasize the importance of caffeine to functioning and the inadvisability of approac…

On this, the occasion of T. S. Eliot’s birth, it’s interesting to revisit (or, I should say, visit—if you didn’t happen to be around in 1965) his Times obituary. Especially this bit: Lacked Flamboyance In his later years he had an office in Londo…

At the age of fifteen, I embarked upon a get-rich-quick scheme that I incidentally felt was a really valuable public service. I planned to make audio recordings of the various midcentury career romances I’d collected, and then to somehow duplicate …

We had typed our stories in the computer lab, and I remember thinking that mine looked professional. I was also pretty sure it was excellent. Fiction writing was not my strong suit—I would never have ranked myself up there with Travis, whose storie…

Colette once wrote that it’s impossible to write about love while you’re in it. (I’m paraphrasing.) I think the same is true of depression, although for different reasons. Love is too euphoric; depression is too tedious. It is not dramatic, it …

When I was in tenth grade, I went through a phase when I cut class all the time. Not in a fun way—I never told any of my friends what I was doing—or to be rebellious. In retrospect, I think I must have been depressed; I simply could not face othe…

[portfolio_slideshow include="76998,76999,77000,77001,77002,77003,77004,77005,77006,77007" exclude="65536"] You could spend hours marveling at Arthur Rackham’s work. The legendary illustrator, born on September 19, 1867, was incredibly prolific, a…

The moment of crisis had come, and I must face it. My old fears, my diffidence, my shyness, my hopeless sense of inferiority, must be conquered now and thrust aside. If I failed now I should fail forever.
―Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca It must be w…

With the passage of time come certain revelations. Sometimes these are melancholy; people you love are aging, your window for having a family is shrinking, you will never again know the euphoria of youth. Others are welcome. It is comforting to know …

It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot ‘do’; they can only be done by. Children who do not understand this often do wrong things, and then the dolls are hurt and abuse…

Yesterday I saw my first selfie stick. I had read of such things, but I’d never seen one in the wild. It was being wielded by an extremely chic Japanese tourist who held her iPhone at, well, stick’s length, her face shaded by a floppy-brimmed hat…

If you live in my building on the Upper West Side, you do not need to own an alarm clock, at least not if you want to wake up at eight A.M. Sleeping beyond that hour is impossible—that’s when the preschool opens its yard for the first playtime of…

Ann Rachlin, storyteller, MBE, and pioneer of music appreciation, has been working for years—she’s now eighty—but she really came to prominence in the mideighties, when she started teaching little Prince William. I wonder if that’s when my mo…

If you write, and you are not a journalist, and you don’t write fiction, people want to know why. These are hard questions to answer. Sometimes one admires fiction too much to attempt it. Sometimes one lacks the gift for invention. No one gets at t…

Scrolling through Retronaut, you might run across a 1927 pamphlet called “Examination of Conscience for Boys and Girls,” which the site resurfaced last year. It’s a Catholic publication by a Jesuit brother named A.J. Wilwerding, distributed by …

The queue for customs was long, and very disorganized. People kept trying to cut—or they cut inadvertently, and were yelled at. But really, it was hard to tell what was a line, and who was in charge, and what they wanted from you. You could only …

When you’re traveling, you understand what you really need, or want, or find comforting—what you can do without and what’s essential. In my case, traveling illuminates an addiction to cookbooks. People have written beautifully about their love…

There are lots of interesting things to see right now at the New-York Historical Society: a delightful exhibit on Ludwig Bemelmans’s New York, a look at the role of cotton in the Northern war effort, a moving show called “ ‘I Live. Send Help.…

Growing up around wisecracking old relatives, you learn early how to craft a comeback. It doesn’t need to be that witty. It doesn’t even need to make sense. It just needs to be kind of sassy and really fast, to show you’re wise to the game or s…

Late this morning, the pipes of my toilet began to make a noise that I can only describe as haunting. How to explain it? Loud, very loud. Sad, very sad. A sort of melancholy lowing, a primal moan expressing things seen and unseen. One could imagine a…

Looking at this pretty slideshow of circa-1900 book covers, one is struck by a couple of things. First, the beauty and elegance of the design. And, second, the fact that the titles are all unfamiliar. Of course, beautiful, striking covers are produ…

New Yorkers like to affect jadedness in the face of celebrity; we yawn, we stare fixedly in the other direction, we scorn star-struck tourists  And yet today, I had a celeb sighting so exciting I reacted like a middle-schooler at a taping of Total Re…

Disney’s Snow White is an animation classic, and a beautiful one. But if you’re looking for something altogether weirder (albeit shorter) go back four years, and check out the Fleischer Studios’s 1933 Snow White. Technically, this is a Betty Boop sho…

Would it be frivolous to bring a class-action lawsuit against the Emmys? I can’t be the only one who slept poorly and, when she did drop off, slid into nightmare. One assumes productivity suffered. Wages and jobs may even have been lost. It’s not …

People talk about a “Keeper Shelf” for those books they love more than any others. Those which, I suppose, are worth owning in this time when owning a physical book means something more than it once did. (Or, as much as it once did.) For my money…

If you wish to celebrate Dorothy Parker’s birthday with a small gift to yourself, you have many options. An Etsy search of the writer’s name will give you letterpress prints and pillows and pins; a locket; earrings, several flasks; a bracelet; a …

While browsing the New York Public Library’s menu archives—a fine way to pass a few hours—a friend of mine ran across this document, from a 1919 insurance pamphlet called “Why Read?”, and rightly supposed it would be of interest to me. I…

James’s writings about New York disclose, more than anything, an anger, quite unlike any other anger in James, at what has been lost to him, what has been done, in the name of commerce and material progress, to a place he once knew. It is not an or…

I watched two biopics this weekend. Both had been well reviewed, and both featured bravura lead performances from actors who played, in both cases, bona fide geniuses. You walked out of the movie knowing more about these geniuses’ careers, their ac…

“1986 Mets: A Year to Remember is quite possibly the most amazing video yearbook for any professional sports team … ever.” That’s a comment from someone named the Wright Stache, who’s done God’s work by putting most of said video yearbook o…

Today is Edna Ferber’s birthday. It’s funny, when you think about it, if you think about it. To the extent Ferber is talked about today, it’s as a member of the Algonquin Round Table. And yet, she was a best-selling author many times over. She …

On Monday, the Times’s David Carr had a gloomy prognosis for the fate of print newspapers. He wrote, It’s a measure of the basic problem that many people haven’t cared or noticed as their hometown newspapers have reduced staffing, days of ci…

When I heard the news that Lauren Bacall had died, at first I felt the melancholy we all feel when another legend of a fading age goes. And then I thought: Is she in the Scotty Bowers book? Since Valentine’s Day, 2012, the world has been divided …

I have been trying for some time now to write this post, but it’s been very hard for me. Not emotionally, I mean—physically. My hands go funny, my vision blurs, my legs get weak, and I start to feel sick. In short, I get woozy. Allow me to explai…

I’m sorry to Godwin out on you, gang, but I have learned something that I need to share with you immediately: despite years of slanderous rumors to the contrary … Hitler was not a vegetarian. At any rate, so argues the “vegetarian historian” Ry…

Now that it is going to be sold, my grandparents’ house, and the summers we spent there, seem cloaked in romance. I remember the trips to the thrift store, the games in the phalanx of sheds, the maple bars from Red’s Donuts, nature walks with my …

Yesterday I went suit shopping with my brother. The suit was to be a birthday gift from my parents; I’d been entrusted with the task of supervising the purchase. We started out in a well-known British chain. “He’s looking for a suit,” I annou…

Among other things, E. B. White has the distinction of being one of the few writers to really express the misery of seasonal allergies. In “The Summer Catarrh” (1938) he details Daniel Webster’s struggles with hay fever, proclaiming, “there…

It’s a strange coincidence that I should think to look up Ruth Sawyer today. Last night, I mentioned her book Roller Skates to a friend—I thought her nine-year-old daughter might enjoy it—but I had no idea that August 5 was her birthday. Sawye…

Yesterday, I decided to walk home across the Brooklyn Bridge. With this in mind, I had downloaded a fine recording of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” before setting off, and planned to commune with Whitman, or whatever, as I marched, marveling at the c…

For many years, I had trouble spelling the word Wednesday. I remember writing out the days of the week in third grade and wrestling with the e’s: Wedenesday. Wedneseday. Wendsday. After all, were these spellings any less arbitrary than the correct …

The other day, a friend sent me a link to a Reddit conversation: What common sounds from a hundred years ago are very rare or just plain don’t exist anymore?  This, in turn, led us to the Museum of Endangered Sounds, which I highly recommend to a…

My father is a great TV watcher, and he keeps me abreast of the state of American television. Recently, he urged me to watch the U.S. reboot of the British reality show Married at First Sight, which, as the title suggests, introduces two willing stra…

The optimists among us may think we’re okay: the world will sort itself out, the climate will stabilize, young people will always read and dream and give us hope for the future. And yet, sometimes you see something so objectively depressing that it…

I was midway through a very different sort of post today when something unexpected happened: I got hit in the face on the subway. It was an accident, but no less unpleasant for that. On the subway, you expect a certain amount of violence: in the cou…

“He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it.” —Catch-22 Can a reader and a character be simultaneously amused? I’m sure plenty of really smart people have written about this—and maybe even answered it author…

Somewhere in the world there exists a clip of Hugh Hefner on one talk show or another. I can neither remember what the show was nor the exact wording of the exchange, but the following paraphrase has become legendary in my family: INTERVIEWER: Do …

One might wonder at the wisdom of undertaking a batch of homemade jam on a ninety-degree day. But I think about it this way: when people actually canned fresh food to get through the winter, it all happened in the summer; hot weather is when you’re s…

For longer than I care to admit, I have been unable to scroll down on my computer. This is only the latest in a series of laptop-related inconveniences, but, given the nature of my employment, is something of a problem. If you manage to catch the scr…

If you had asked me two days ago if there existed any Catholic-themed YouTube video stranger than the one where G. K. Chesterton battles a cartoonishly evil Nietzsche, I would have said, “Of course not.” But that was before I saw this group of …

Not too long ago, I was asked to contribute a travel tip to an article. I felt like a complete fraud, of course; my vacations, such as they were, consisted of the occasional bus visit to friends in D.C. and the odd weekend with my parents, heavy on h…

When I was thirteen, and my dear friend Laura went on a teen hiking tour of the British Isles, I wrote her religiously. Letters, yes, but cards, too. I was stationary in New York, but I had found a lot of vintage postcards somewhere ,and sent a pair …

The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn’t real. I know that, and I also know that if I’m careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle. ―Stephen King The rain is pouring up here in Maine: King c…

“You’ve certainly had good weather,” people keep telling us. They say this almost resentfully, as if we do not appreciate the honor being conferred, could never understand the rarity of a full eight days of cloudless blue skies and temperatures…

On Saturday, in Maine, I rode my bicycle the mile and a half to the very comfortable Northeast Harbor Library, which contains well-stocked “Maine” and “Garden” rooms; it’s currently showcasing a collection of antique “woolies,” folk-a…

Twice this week, I was stood up. In both cases there were extenuating circumstances, attempts to communicate, and sincere apologies—which I had no trouble accepting. The truth is, I didn’t mind; the truth is, I love waiting. Good thing, because …

July 2 is the midpoint of the year—we’re 182 days into 2014 with 182 to go. This is obscurely depressing, although there is something neat about its falling on a Wednesday. It’s all downhill from here, you might say—although sometimes people …

“The Summer looks out from her brazen tower,
Through the flashing bars of July.”
—Francis Thompson, “A Corymbus for Autumn” By the time he died of tuberculosis in 1907, the forty-seven-year-old Francis Thompson had found respect and moderate …

Sally Bell’s started making box lunch in the 1950s, but the recipes used to make the salad, sandwich spread, deviled egg, cheese wafer, and cupcake that go into the box date back to the 1920s, when Sarah Cabell Jones opened her bakery in a buil…

In the summer, a trip to the grocery store or the laundromat can pose one existential conundrum after another. On seemingly every corner of the city, one is greeted by a young person with a clipboard in his hand, an enormous T-shirt on his back, and …

“The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance.” —Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’” Too much camp is bad for the soul. It’s unwholesome, lacking in spiritual nourishment—like eating only processed foods. Irony is no substitute…

Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe was a prominent nineteenth-century chemist—a pioneer in photography and the first to obtain the element vanadium in its pure form. He was also, incidentally, Beatrix Potter’s uncle. In 1906, he wrote, I also wrote a First …

Over the weekend, someone asked me how I’d argue for the survival of the print book. I was taken aback; it felt like being asked to defend food against Soylent Green, or sex against the exclusive domain of artificial insemination. But I considered …

Yesterday, a friend and I entered into a great debate. It started with my question: “Does the clown exist who could make you laugh?” He said yes; he thought that clown who does the act with snow off Union Square would make him laugh. (The show …

Each member of my family has quirks and foibles. I stomp my foot like a cartoon furious person when I lose my temper, and I once humiliated myself the one time I attempted the road test by waiting ten minutes to turn at an intersection, panicking, an…

Lately I’ve been listening to the excellent BBC documentary World War I, which you can download and then listen to, incongruously, while waiting on line at the grocery store. The series presents the listener with a multifaceted portrait of the Great …

I remember the moment clearly: it was a late winter afternoon, and I was sitting on the radiator in my bedroom, reading Michelle Phillips’s memoir California Dreamin instead of doing my ninth-grade English homework. The author described moving into t…

When I was twelve and visiting my grandparents in California, we made weekly stops at the Naval Postgraduate School Thrift Shop, where the proprietress suggested that I enter a competition—she wanted me to submit my own concept for the theme of the…

In honor of James Joyce, I’ve spent Bloomsday carrying around a pair of doll’s underpants. I encourage all Joyce enthusiasts to do the same. Doll underpants figure in Ulysses as a signifier in Leopold and Molly’s courtship—they’re what the cri…

Today marks the birthday of the English novelist and playwright Fanny Burney, born in 1752, whose Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer were all major sensations in her day. Hers were satirical novels—often now called proto-Austenian—which …

I have a terrible feeling that the game “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral” is an endangered species. Granted, my evidence is strictly anecdotal—several kids I know had never heard of it—but this is nonetheless a cause for serious concern. It’s n…

Back when I worked in retail, a friend and I whiled away our breaks and slow days with what we called, unofficially, the Lurid Book Club. Admissions standards were straightforward: to be considered, a book had to be lurid. Accordingly, we read Flower…

The food takes awhile which gave us time to watch a waitress deliver a Dutch Baby and envelop us with its fragrant, perhaps sacred, steam. A tray of ruby grapefuit [sic] juice in large glasses made me think of luxurious jewels. Obviously we had trave…

Not long ago, I happened to pop into a candy store to buy a bag of Dutch licorice shaped like wooden shoes. “That’s a big bag,” said the girl who works there, indicating my burdens. “What’s in it?” “Oh,” I said, “some antidepressan…

On Wednesday, I mentioned to you a certain menu description. This description caused something of an existential crisis. I wept; I ranted; I pondered existence. But life is not just a vale of tears! I might still be lying in bed, paralyzed by the en…

Like most families, mine makes frequent use of shorthand. In the case of me and my mother, much of the talk derives from the work of Georgette Heyer, the prolific author who created the genre of Regency Romance in the first half of the twentieth cen…

The other day, having traveled to a midsize American city that shall remain nameless, my dining companion and I encountered the following description on an online restaurant menu: Tender day boat scallops, lightly cajuned, pan seared with pancetta…

In a recent Science of Us post, Melissa Dahl investigates the evolution of the exclamation mark. As one grammarian tells her, “Exclamation points are becoming the standard after salutations and happy or eager statements such as ‘I’m looking for…

My brother was one of those kids who loved camp. He started young, went for years, and, when he was older, returned as a counselor. During the school year, he and his friends would periodically meet up at an Outback Steakhouse in Midtown. He still at…

Here’s a weekend recommendation for you—think of it as an extended Staff Pick, if you like. Bill and Coo was made in 1948 to showcase “Burton’s Birds,” a troupe of trained lovebirds managed by former silent-movie actor George Burton. And doe…

On this day in 1886, Georgia pharmacist John Pemberton placed his first advertisement for Coca-Cola, in The Atlanta Journal. The rest, as we say, is history. Painful history, in my case. I don’t think my parents had anything special against Coke; …

This week hundreds of passionate practitioners, armed with their passports and their dance shoes, have descended on the city where it started to celebrate the man who was one of its early creators. “It has a universality,” said Cynthia R. Millma…

“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belong…

Big in 2014: the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake, Maine. Founded in 1783 in what was then called Thompson’s Pond Plantation, the community consists of eighteen buildings, an orchard, a tree farm, vegetable and herb gardens, livestock pastures,…

Back in the day when video stores existed and I used to patronize them regularly, I depended particularly upon the judgment of a cinephile clerk named Will. One day, I went into his Brooklyn store and found someone different behind the counter.  I …

Today marks the day of Alexander Pope’s birth, in 1688. We remember Pope as a poet, essayist, satirist, translator, and one of the most quotable men in English. He’s responsible for, among many other aphoristic gems: “To err is human, to forgiv…

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me…

“Many people tolerate squalor,” a friend once said to me. “But you’re the only person I know who seems to have a positive preference for it.” Evidence to the contrary, I don’t, in fact, enjoy filth and chaos. But I do have a high thresho…

The Schiava Turca (Turkish Slave) is one of the many mysteries of art history. The painting, a 1530s Mannerist masterpiece by Parmigianino, is considered an icon of the artist’s hometown, but no one is sure of the sitter’s identity. Was it a nobl…

Last week, I was invited to a fancy dinner in honor of a personage in the international art scene who had curated an interactive installation in an urban high school. More specifically, my rather more impressive friend was invited, and he asked if he…

Sophie Calle’s “Rachel/Monique” is currently on view at the Church of the Heavenly Rest on upper Fifth Avenue, a ZIP code the artist says the eponymous subject—her mother—would have appreciated, “because she always loved the Upper East Si…

I. Once, when I was very young and foolish, I threw a party, the refreshments for which consisted exclusively of deviled eggs. Mind you, there was some variety: I made deviled eggs with bacon, deviled eggs with horseradish, deviled eggs with pickle …

I am ashamed to admit that, as recently as one week ago, I’d never heard of Fredda Brilliant. My life was the poorer for it. Born in Poland to a Jewish family in the diamond trade, Brilliant was an actress, novelist, screenwriter, and activist who …

Last weekend I had brunch with my mother, and she related an incident from the day of the interboro bike race. My mom was walking through Central Park and found her way, and the way of several other pedestrians, blocked by an apologetic young race …

“Every time I buy a book here, it changes my life,” the man told me earnestly. He was not the bookseller, but he was minding the stand on Broadway and Seventy-Third Street while the proprietor got a fruit juice from the nearby cart. He clearly wa…

Last night, I attended a talk at the New York Public Library between Paul Holdengräber and George Prochnik, the author of The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World. Three different publishers were involved; the room was packed and at…

Cornelius Gurlitt, identified in obituaries as a “Nazi-era art hoarder,” died this morning in Munich of heart trouble. Gurlitt’s cache of more than 1,400 important modern works, inherited from his art-dealer father—including pieces by Picasso…

Today on HuffPo books, Jay Crownover discusses the different subcategories of the “literary bad boy,” which include “The Unattainable” (Sherlock Holmes), “The Nonconformist” (Holden Caulfield, of course), “The Alpha” (Achilles), “…

You never really get over secret childish chauvinism about your birthday month. At least, I never did. In my mind, May will always be the best month of the year; emerald, the best birthstone; and lily-of-the-valley, the finest flower. (On the subject…

Last night, I was part of a panel on the late novelist Dame Muriel Spark, in concert with the publication of The Informed Air, a collection of her essays. In no way am I an expert, but I am a devoted fan—more and more as I get older—and I was gla…

If you get the chance before September 7, make a point of checking out the New York Public Library’s exhibition “The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter.” Even if you need no convincing on this score, you’ll love it: the exhibition is di…

Once, when I was working as a waitress, a mother came into the restaurant with her two little boys, whom we’d seen before. I must say, they were not particularly appealing children—they were wild and hard to control, and frequently cruised around…

The New Orleans Advocate reports that “Mickey Easterling, a New Orleans socialite known as much for her grand lifestyle and outlandish hats as for her civic, cultural, and political activism, died Monday at her Lakefront home.” Easterling was a…

This morning my family went to several tag sales, as is our habit. Saturday is of course the major day for such things, but there are always a few that begin earlier, and a careful perusal of the local papers had yielded three, of which one looked pr…

Is there a song about city life more evocative than “Up on the Roof,” the Drifters’ 1963 hit? In 1980, The Illustrated History of Rock and Roll said, “From the internal rhyme of ‘stairs’ and ‘cares’ to the image of ascending from the street…

Someone in my building—or maybe two different people, I don’t know—rejoices in cruel, taunting names for his wireless networks: “MineNotYours” and “NoFreeLunch.” “I’m just going to go out on a limb here,” my old boyfriend once sai…

We are currently in the midst of what will almost certainly not be referred to as the Great Lime Shortage of 2014. Following the decimation of the domestic lime crop in the 1990s, the United States is now largely dependent on foreign imports. And thi…

When Edith M. Thomas wrote “Talking in Their Sleep” in 1885, she was already regarded as one of America’s foremost poets. Well into the last century, her poems were part of the canon—and this one, in particular, was a common inclusion in grad…

Yesterday I made some Easter-themed cupcakes, topped with cream-cheese frosting and dusted with green-tinted coconut. Within each nest, I placed four jelly beans. Brand: Teeny-Been. They were, if I do say so myself, pretty cunning. When I was a…

Someone has posted the following to Reddit: My roommate gets distracted sometimes, and she misplaced her book in the freezer. I’m not making this up. The pages are warped from moisture and most of them are frozen solid in a block. How can we s…

Nathan Pyle has recently written an illustrated handbook for living in—or, perhaps even more crucially, visiting—New York. NYC (Basic Tips and Etiquette) contains such valuable tips as Beware of the empty train car, it’s empty for a reas…

I am a rereader by nature. Like most rereaders, I have a few beloved favorites—Sisters By a River, or We Think the World of You, or A Girl in Winter—that bring me comfort as well as pleasure. Then there are a few books that I know just as well as t…

Yesterday, I was one of several people manning a book-centric advice booth as part of a New York literary festival. For days beforehand, I was paralyzed with nerves. I couldn’t face the other, more legitimate advice-givers; I felt like a charlatan …

Recently someone gave me a book. It was a book, she said, that she knew I would love. She had read it and thought of me at once. It was a supremely kind gift. My heart sank. There are few things more oppressive than the things you are supposed to lo…

It is spring now, and very hard not to feel in clichés. Especially with daffodils everywhere—and very cheap they are, too. “Telephone flowers,” a friend of mine calls them. I buy them by the armful; don’t you? When I was thirteen, I wrote m…

Yesterday, a dog raced a Metro-North train from the South Bronx into Manhattan. The train slowed down at several points so the dog, an adorable shepherd/collie mix, would not risk injury. Passengers feared for her safety during the mad dash—and che…

A counterpart to yesterday’s piece.
Speaking of characters. There was a time when, for a small adventure, one had only to go to a particular bakery in the West Village. You know the one I mean. The owner was unfailingly unpleasant, the coffee unfaili…

Over the weekend, Kitchen Arts and Letters, the wonderful culinary bookshop on New York’s Upper East Side, held a sale. I scampered over and, among other treasures, came away with something called The Eccentric Cookbook, by one Richard, Earl of Bra…

“That’s it!” someone exclaimed to her friend. “That’s the place where they meet!” She was standing in front of an Upper West Side coffee shop that figures in a pivotal scene in the 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail. They snapped a picture, they we…

Dear Editor,
I am a Russian revolutionist and a freethinker. Here in America I became acquainted with a girl who is also a freethinker. We decided to marry, but the problem is that she has Orthodox parents, and for their sake we must have a religious …

The problem is the beaming. For whatever reason, I frequently boast a huge smile when in public, and as any city-dweller will tell you, this is a bad idea. I may be grinning about a doll, a muffin, a soda label. “She’s mad happy,” a teenager on…

If there is a baseball team in your area, you may one day be asked to throw out the first pitch. Throwing out the first pitch is a way to recognize someone who is famous or is being honored before the start of a baseball game. —eHow, How to Throw Out…

Every funeral is unhappy in its own way. In the case of a second cousin of mine, this way was unexpected. There was grief, yes, and remembering, and laughing, and subterranean tensions, and tearful reunions, and the occasional old score to be settl…

There are certain places—mostly playgrounds—that post signs advising visitors that no unaccompanied adults will be admitted without a child escort. Sometimes, these are practical concerns: jungle gyms and ball pits are not made to bear a grownup…

Do people still read The Stupids, that classic series of children’s books written by Harry Allard and James Marshall in the seventies and eighties? They must, right? They’re too good. Making fun of fools may not be officially acceptable these d…

The thermometer outside my kitchen window reads thirty-nine degrees, firmly on the leonine side of March’s spectrum. But in the park, trees are budding. In the greenmarkets, forsythia are rearing their heads. And, in restaurants, shad are running. …

This morning, it was announced that the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) had named the Japanese writer Nahoko Uehashi and Brazilan illustrator Roger Mello the winners of the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Award. Founded in 1956, the…

March 21st was my maternal grandparents’ wedding anniversary; they were married in 1946 in Silver Spring, Maryland, my grandmother’s hometown. As a child I loved to pore over the Silver Spring Standard wedding notice in her scrapbook, which conta…

The New England Butt’ry Shelf Cookbook, written in 1969 by Mary Mason Campbell, is one of the most perfect works of nostalgia ever published. Ms. Campbell runs through the year’s calendar, remembering her New Hampshire family’s idyllic holida…

Repeating compliments to a third party is a bit like giving money: everyone’s glad to get them, but the giving can be awkward. It was not always so. Time was, the passing on of compliments was so ritualized a part of life that the practice had a n…

Since I wish to spare you the disappointment I myself experienced Sunday morning, I’m going to give it to you straight. Despite what the New York Times headline—“A Star Was (Recently) Born: A Play Boldly Casts Babies”—may imply, the current p…

“I sent you a little cat filled with sweets a few days ago but perhaps you do not know the story about the cat of Beaugency,” begins James Joyce’s The Cat and the Devil, first published in 1965. If you were lucky enough to get your hands on this book…

There is no time that is not hard and complicated. Disaster is never far away. But in the immortal words of Fred Rogers, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘look for the helpers. You will always…

“Bond always mistrusted short men. They grew up from childhood with an inferiority complex. All their lives they would strive to be big—bigger than the others who had teased them as a child. Napoleon had been short, and Hitler. It was the sho…

Many of my closest friends are sick of hearing my “theory of aliens.” This is not a political stance, but rather a strong opinion about extraterrestrials. For much of my life, I’ve had a faint aversion to aliens. I didn’t like movies or X-Fil…

The other day I visited with a four-year-old friend; we read a book called Manners. As the title implies, this is a guide to basic children’s etiquette, with an emphasis on consideration for others, and it was cute and instructive. But I couldn’t…

Sometimes I like to think about what kind of sounds the people of a hundred or seventy-five years ago might have taken for granted, and those that are new—like the rattle of that stiff cereal bag, or a waking computer, of course—and those that wi…

Yesterday, the estimable Margaret Eby sent me something she had run across in The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook, a 1961 oddity fiercely beloved by culinary bibliophiles. This book—which featured an introduction by Alice B. Toklas and illustrations…

The Whitney Biennial has generated any number of reviews—the more comprehensive ones will tell you about the distinguished curators, the three “biennials within a biennial,” the ambient sound installations. So far, I have not read anything abo…

Once upon a time, a very nice couple whom I didn’t know very well threw some kind of party. I can’t remember what the occasion was, but I do know that they lived in a nice apartment near the Broadway-Lafayette F stop, and that I went to the par…

Do you remember Amish Friendship Bread? Basically, it’s like a chain letter, except you give people bags of gloppy, smelly starter, which they grow and mix with various strange ingredients, and distribute along with loaves of bread; the idea is you…

Over the weekend, for reasons too silly to get into, I decided to change my phone number. It was a surprisingly emotional process. I have had this, my first phone number, for some twelve years, and there was something bittersweet about abandoning the…

Looking at this year’s Best Picture nominees, I realized that while I had liked three, nine out of nine had made me tear up—including The Wolf of Wall Street. Fellow movie criers will understand. Especially for those of us who might hesitate to cry i…

Saturday is a special day for buying and doing beautiful things. A whole day stretching ahead. It’s a new lifestyle. A man. A woman. Art exhibits. Antiquing. Movies. Cocktails. Shopping. … together. You’re searching for a special gown. You want…

“I didn’t even know you could still get that!” exclaimed a rather fabulous looking tiny woman in a turban and plaid coat. I had ordered a date-nut bread sandwich with cream cheese. We were on line at the Chock Full o’ Nuts kiosk located in my…

The MTA has an initiative called Poetry in Motion, which brings verse to riders of the New York City subway. The last time I was groped on the subway, I was reading one such poem: “To the Reader: Twilight,” by Chase Twichell. It is an enjoyable, …

As John Updike wrote in a 2008 New Yorker piece, Max Factor was “the inventor of modern makeup.” Not only did this former beautician to the czars concoct the first movie makeup (it held up under hot lights) and bring commercial cosmetics to the a…

The Hammer Museum, in LA, is currently showing an exhibition titled “Tea and Morphine: Women in Paris, 1880 to 1914.” The juxtaposition of the two substances is deliberate; the show aims to present what the curators call “a multidimensional por…

I am writing this from mid-air, having checked in via a code on my phone, and am generally feeling very much like an Art Deco cartoon. The Future is here. It is more like the past and the present than we expected. There was a day on which two things…

I throw myself on your mercy, readers. For some years now, I have been searching fruitlessly for a long-lost book, and I’m hoping someone out there can help me remember the title. The problem is, I have very little to go on: I know it is a paperba…

“Gilded New York,” an exhibition up at the Museum of the City of New York right now, showcases the ostentatious visual culture of late-nineteenth-century elites. A friend and I went last weekend, in the midst of a heavy snow. There are impossibl…

My dad is a man who likes to make time. Forget roadside attractions, lingering meals, and charming scenic routes: when we traveled as a family, speed was our goal. He especially liked to break previous records; I remember trying to see how many exits…

I wrote in my journal, “It is Valentine’s Day. Very good weather. I walked through Central Park feeling lonely and benign and so happy for everyone I saw who was in love, or starting to be in love. I have come to accept that that kind of thing is not…

My colleague Stephen sent along this clipping earlier today, from an 1855 issue of the New York Times. Nor is this the only recorded instance of snowball-related violence. January 29, 1863: Confederate troops stationed in the Rappahannock Valley …

During my junior year of college, I had the chance to study at a university in London. I flew out of JFK on September 15, 2001, and the flight was so empty I was able to lie down across four seats for the first and last time in my life. In England, …

It has been some years now since I mastered the art of dressing strawberries in tuxedos. I was first introduced to the skill at a friend’s baby shower in Rhode Island; a young woman demonstrated how one dipped the strawberry in white chocolate, an…

Some years ago, the Museum of the City of New York mounted a fantastic show devoted to the work of the decorator and entertainment doyenne Dorothy Draper. Draper’s two books, Entertaining is Fun! and Decorating is Fun!, have been rereleased with th…

The summer before I started college, I worked part-time in an antique linens shop in an East Coast vacation town. The owner, Theresa, was a warm, elegant woman who taught me not just how to do bookkeeping and how to tell the difference between point …

I devoutly hope there is an academic somewhere writing a serious essay about the role of anthropomorphic comestibles in Depression-era cartoons. I am no authority, but it seems pretty clear to me that, besides the obvious economic implications, all t…

There are a lot of things I should be reading right now: great books, worthy books, new books, books that, quite frankly, I need to finish for work. But I cannot. Ever since I ran across The Secret Sex Lives of Famous People on my grandparents’ boo…

For several years, I lived in a neighborhood that worried my parents. But I liked my neighbors, I could afford the rent, and, in the grand tradition of fools, I lived a blissfully oblivious existence. I never once felt unsafe. Well, that’s not str…

Yesterday, the Seahawks romped to a 43-8 blowout over Denver. The general consensus is that Super Bowl XLVIII was disappointing: tension-free, uncomfortably lopsided, vaguely embarrassing for Manning. The commercials were meh. Bruno Mars kind of bro…

  When we graduated sixth grade, in the skirts and ties we had laboriously sewn—mine was apple-green gingham—with the corsages and boutonnieres our teachers had made to match, I was the first to receive my diploma. This was not a particular di…

Even at my loneliest and most cynical, I have always liked Valentine’s Day. The commercialized romance bothers me not a whit—I like watching couples being romantic, or awkward, or goofy. But this I will say: for those of us who don’t love choco…

I have never been one to moon over resort collections or sigh enviously over my friends’ sun-drenched Instagram photos. The truth is, I dislike the beach and sort of enjoy the misery of living through an unrelieved winter; it makes spring that much…

There were extenuating circumstances. I was in LA for work, and I had known, intellectually, that it would be warm in California—hot, even. But when you’re deep in a New York winter, who really thinks to pack a sundress? The lightest thing I had…

My life boasts few distinctions, but I make the worst coffee you will ever drink. It’s almost as if, on the day I was born, the fairies stood over my cradle (okay, incubator) Sleeping Beauty–style, and the first good fairy declared, “She will be …

To paraphrase Laurie Colwin, the world divides unequally between those who love haggis (not too many) and those who loathe and fear it (most). Tomorrow is Robert Burns’s birthday, aka Burns Night, which is to say, probably the zenith of the haggis-…

I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, in one of the handful of commuter towns along the Hudson. One of these villages contained a bookstore—a good one, with a fine selection of titles and a section devoted to attractive wrapping paper and gree…

The girl and the boy stood in the doorway of the crosstown bus as we crossed the park. She was dressed all in black, her lank hair streaked with crimson, eyes circled with heavy kohl, wrists crisscrossed with black rubber bracelets. Her backpack bore…

The other day, my brother called and asked if I would look and see if he had accidentally left his good trousers at my apartment while he was crashing with me; he needed to attend a funeral. I said he had, and that I would press them for him. “I w…

The day of my thirtieth birthday dawned wet and cool. What started as a determined drizzle had settled, by late morning, into hard rain. This scuttled most of our plans, but my boyfriend and I were determined to fill the day with fun, and set off dog…

I like my psychiatrist, but I often find that occupying fifty minutes with an account of my tedious life feels like a high price to pay for responsible prescription. “Do you try to make him laugh?” my dad asked, when he picked me up from my firs…

Last night, a circa-1877 water main burst on Fifth Avenue near East Thirteenth Street, resulting in substantial flooding and, one imagines, a grueling night for any number of MTA workers. Reports the New York Times on the City Room blog, Basements…

“Please don’t confront me with my failures,” sang Nico. “I have not forgotten them.” I can sympathize. Said failures are particularly difficult to forget when they sit glowering at you from your refrigerator. I have often pitied noncooks wh…

Many years ago, when Missed Connections, the creepy/romantic online personal ads, still felt like a big deal, one friend of mine claimed he had received not one, not two, but three such Craigslist missives from enamored young ladies. The guy in quest…

It is pierogi weather. Here in New York, that means going to Greenpoint, or one of the Polish or Ukrainian coffee shops in the East Village, or maybe one of the two warring dairy luncheonettes nearby. Fried or boiled is a matter of heritage and perso…

Not that long ago, I was walking down a Brooklyn street and encountered an elderly woman surrounded by grocery bags. I offered to help carry them into her apartment, and I was sort of disappointed when she said yes and I saw what a long staircase it …

While visiting my parents over the holidays, I spent a few hours looking over my dad’s extensive magazine archive. He happened to have a copy of the first-ever 1963 New York magazine, Clay Felker’s then Sunday-magazine supplement to the New York He…

“There is a new hotspot for heavy petting on the Upper West Side,” declared the West Side Rag, awesomely, some months ago. Widely considered the dirtiest, crummiest, saddest, and generally worst movie theater in Manhattan, the Loews Eighty-Fourth…

I moved to Greenpoint, in North Brooklyn, on the heels of a breakup, and although I lived there for years, in my memories it is always somehow winter. While I was hardly a pioneer in the neighborhood—a recognizable mumblecore actor lived one fire e…

  Dear friends, There are going to be some exciting things happening here at the Daily! For starters, after nearly two years of editing the site, I’m going to be shifting my focus to writing: as a contributing editor and sort of house writer, I…

Firecrackers and whistles sounded the advent of the New Year of 1965 in St. Louis. Stripteasers ran from the bars in Gaslight Square to dance in the street when midnight came. Burroughs, who had watched television alone that night, was asleep in …

Happy birthday, Isaac Asimov! Maybe. Probably. Newbery winner Kate DiCamillo has been named Ambassador of Young People’s Literature, a position which has been around since 2008. Sure you can find plenty of lists of best of 2013, but what books …

All this week, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from 2013. Happy holidays! “What would Ben Franklin make of this, if he were sitting here right now?” mused my father. We were driving on the West Side Highway. I was living with …

At the Paris Review offices, several of us were lucky enough to receive, in recent days, a mailing from a friend and contributor to these pages. It was a plain cream Christmas card on which was printed, “‘Merry Christmas!’ the man threatened.” —Wi…

All this week, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from 2013. Happy holidays! Herewith, Benedict Cumberbatch reads John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”  

One of my favorite novels of the past few years is Andrés Neuman’s Traveler of the Century, an ambitious “total novel” that is many things: a love story, a murder mystery, and, most of all, a novel of ideas. While his latest, Talking to Ourselves, …

The Dictionary of American Regional English is an epic compendium that’s been in the works since 1965. Now, it’s done and all 60,000 words are available on a great interactive site. Just to give you a taste of the myriad riches contained therein, t…

Check out this new Heart of Darkness, illustrated by Matt Kish … if you dare. By now you have  probably heard the allegations that Shia LaBeouf allegedly plagiarized a Daniel Clowes book. Then he plagiarized his apology. Now, there’s this.…

“I was realistic about the book’s marketing … it was, after all, a memoir about some cats, and no state-of-the-nation literary epic. Nonetheless, Simon & Schuster’s birthday-cardish cover—an anonymous actor kitten sitting in a pair of jeans, agains…

When you think about it, there are not many Christmas-movie heroines. But then, nobody ever put Barbara Stanwyck in a corner—and with Christmas in Connecticut’s Elizabeth Lane, she gave us a character who was tough, smart, and irrepressibly modern.…

Melville House captions this “vintage bookmobile drama,” and we challenge you to imagine exactly what was going through the brunette’s head. Or, more to the point, why.  

Hunger Games vs. Twilight: a textual analysis. Endangered shop alert: Main Street Books in St. Charles, Missouri, needs a buyer. But for once it’s not all gloom and doom; the store is solvent, and the owners say they simply want to travel and sp…

If selfie was the word of the year, can the slightly more literary shelfie be far behind? Nothing if not forward-thinking, Neil Gaiman legitimizes it on WhoSay: “A tragic shelfie. We are preparing to move. The books are in boxes…”  

  NPR Books asks, “Was Gollum Done In By Vitamin D Deficiency?” The query is prompted by a new paper in the Medical Journal of Australia, positing that creepy cave-dwellers (rarely the hero) are often victims not of motiveless malignancy, but a la…

Amazon workers in Germany have gone on strike (at what we need not say is a busy time). The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo lives on: using Stieg Larsson’s comprehensive outlines, a new writer will reanimate the Millennium series. The British Libra…

Check out this nifty video, produced by Blank on Blank and PBS Digital Studios, to accompany audio from a 2002 interview with John Freeman.  

“Everyone in Penelope Fitzgerald’s family called her Mops, no one ever called her Penelope unless they met her later in life. And she didn’t like the name Penelope. But it would seem very peculiar for me to call her Mops all the way through.” —Hermio…

Apollinaire (or, at any rate, his Turkish publisher) is on trial in Istanbul. Sofia Coppola is set to adapt Alysia Abbott’s 1970s San Francisco-set Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. The American Library Association has named ten librarians from a…

We have already reminded you about the wonderful gift that is a full year—or even two, or three!—of the best in prose, poetry, interviews, and art. But don’t forget, there is also the Paris Review print series, allowing you to share an archive of nea…

Elif Batuman defends the end-of-year list, in a list. Here are all the best books of 2013 lists. Celebrity death match, Austen style: favorite Mr. Darcy versus dark horse Mr. Knightley. Geek, “a person who is very knowledgeable and enthusiasti…

INTERVIEWER You’ve said you can’t bear to have a bad sentence in front of you. HEMPEL Yes. I still can’t. Makes me ill. —Amy Hempel, the Art of Fiction No. 176  

“Elmore was the coolest guy I knew,” says Leonard’s son Peter.  The Diary of Anne Frank is being turned into an animated film for children. The tenth annual Tournament of Books longlist! Margaret Wrinkle is the winner of the Center for Fiction…

This morning, we mentioned a new bar opening tomorrow in Los Angeles: Barkowski. Writing at LAist, Matthew Bramlett opines, There are so many things wrong with this place that can be seen almost immediately. Barkowski looks like a bar for bougie p…

Mine is not a family given to ritual. We are too chaotic, too scatter-brained, too disorganized. Because my parents’ marriage is “interfaith” (a word I have never once heard them use, and which seems to imply more faith than was in fact mingled), r…

I do realize it must feel like map week around here, but how could we not share this literary street map, loosely based on Victorian London? To quote the Dorothy studio, the map is made up from the titles of over six hundred books from the histor…

Jason Segel will play David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour. Jesse Eisenberg plays reporter David Lipsky. Speaking of LA, a Charles Bukowski-themed bar is opening in Santa Monica. It is called Barkowski. (It should be noted that Brooklyn…

2013 might well be called the year of the best-of list. If you don’t have the time or energy to read through the hundreds of them, here is a handy-dandy infographic (a cheat sheet of sorts) by A Case for Books that collects those titles most often …

A portrait of Jane Austen—you know, the portrait, based on her sister’s sketch—has sold at auction for £135,000, which is actually somewhat below the estimate. “I started to write books in 1982 because I thought I was everywoman,” (all evid…

We highly recommend you spend some time with this nifty interactive map, which plots Ulysses’s epic ten-year voyage of the Odyssey on a real-life globe, placing the sirens, the cyclops, and the lotus eaters in a recognizable geographical context.  …

This is exciting, and something we’ve had in the works for a long time. Since 1985, 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center and The Paris Review have copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers—many of which became the foundation of a …

Subscribe now! Okay, it’s slightly more expensive these days.  

Tattered Covers Books is opening an additional three outlets in Denver. The Pitchfork Review, the new print branch of the venerable music review site, drops (as they might say) this weekend. Stephen King joins Twitter; doesn’t say much; people fr…

This Saturday marks the fourth iteration of what is becoming a beloved holiday tradition: the marathon reading of A Christmas Carol at the Housing Works Bookstore. From one to four P.M., a series of readers—including Jami Attenberg, Saeed Jones, …

Since Alice Munro skipped the trip to Stockholm, there is instead a Nobel video, and we can all watch it! David Ulin on Nelson Mandela, the writer. Here is some unabashed coziness porn: a slideshow of reading nooks. HuffPo ran it on #SanctuarySu…

We love these gorgeous vintage ALA posters!  

My colleagues here at The Paris Review all know that I harbor an irrational aversion to any shade of purple, which reminds me of Lisa Frank stickers, aging hippies, and wizards. (All very well in their own ways, I suppose.) So it is with some reluc…

“To have lived one’s life at the same time, and in the same natal country, as Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a guidance and a privilege we South Africans shared.” Nadine Gordimer pays tribute. In depressing news: the thirty-five-year-old Nat…

By now, you will have heard that Manil Suri has won the coveted twenty-first Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, for a passage from his novel The City of Devi. The award-winning purple prose includes: Surely supernovas explode that instant…

INTERVIEWER You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why. JOAN DIDION It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostil…

Busboys & Poets, the amazingly-named D.C. bookstore/cafe/performance space, is opening a sixth location! The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has named Samuel R. Delany the 2013 science fiction and fantasy Grand Master. (Which is a …

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is being adapted for the screen. No word on who will get the plum role of Jenny in “The Green Ribbon.”  

Nice work, Buckeyes: you curse more than any state in the union. (Not to be confused with our Ohio-born associate editor’s odd penchant for exclaiming, “Jesus Christ and all his merry elves!”)  

The Supreme Court has spoken: Amazon will pay taxes in New York. The family of Norman Rockwell is going to the mattresses over a new biography by Deborah Solomon, which raises questions about the artist’s sexuality. Says Rockwell’s granddaug…

Everyone knows that Heart of Darkness was adapted as Apocalypse Now, but have you ever listened to the 1938 radio version Orson Welles did with the Mercury Theatre? The sound quality is poor, but it’s compelling nonetheless.  

“The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.” —Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses, published on this day in 1897  

Publishing legend André Schiffrin has died, at seventy-eight. Amazon and drones. In the immortal words of Pillow Talk, “some jokes are too obvious to be funny.” Stephen Colbert disagrees. Speaking of! Joyce Carol Oates on Mike Tyson: “To t…

The flight attendant on the cover of 207 does not deceive you: this issue is a ride and a half. For your reading enjoyment we offer: Geoff Dyer on the art of nonfiction—and why he hates that rubric: I don’t think a reasonable assessment of …

“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.” —Edith Sitwell  

INTERVIEWER Can you remember one of the jokes you wrote hanging on a subway strap? ALLEN This was typical of the junk I turned out: Kid next to me in school was the son of a gambler—he’d never take his test marks back—he’d let ’em ride…

New York Observer veteran Peter Kaplan has died, at the age of fifty-nine. At the Girolamini Library in Naples, a librarian has been accused of “one of the most dramatic thefts ever to hit the rare-book world.” Pilfered volumes include rare ed…

While most of us know Black Friday as the nightmarish commerce-fest following Thanksgiving—a term coined in Philadelphia in 1961—in fact the nom de guerre dates back to the nineteenth century. In 1869, robber-barons Jay Gould and James Fisk attempted…

We love the Poetry Foundation’s Record-a-Poem project, in which users are encouraged to read aloud their favorite verses using SoundCloud. Now, in conjunction with its upcoming performance of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, BAM is partnering with …

Miss last night’s McNally Jackson discussion of ekphrasis between Ben Lerner, Geoff Dyer, and our favorite moderator, editor Lorin Stein? Luckily for you, Kate Gavino of Last Night’s Reading illustrated one of many quotable moments.  

In honor of Thanksgiving, novels full of good food. Hundreds of writers have volunteered to sell books at indie bookstores this Small Business Saturday. An undercover BBC investigation has found that working at the Amazon warehouse during the hol…

While book trailers don’t always feel logical, the video made for Nancy Miller’s memoir Breathless is an exception. The project began as a graphic book. As a result, Miller, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, had a wealth of cartoons she had …

Book sculptures by Su Blackwell.  

For all humanity’s technological achievements, no one in the history of the world has ever succeeded in producing a realistic-looking miniature suit for a male doll. Any father doll who works a white-collar job looks instantly ridiculous: lumpen, c…

ROBINSON No, a mystical experience would be wasted on me. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me. One Calvinist notion deeply implanted in me is that there are two sides to your encounter with the world. You don’t simply perceive someth…

“The artist must avoid thinking like a writer.” The letters of Cézanne. “It isn’t only about droll or absurd situations, it’s about the language used to describe those situations.” Paul Auster on Samuel Beckett. In honor of Umberto Eco’s Legendar…

New Yorkers! Tomorrow night, head to McNally Jackson Booksellers to see Geoff Dyer and Ben Lerner discuss how to write about looking (among other things). Moderated by our very own EIC, Lorin Stein.  

Over the past months, we have closely followed the efforts of our friends at St. Mark’s Bookshop to find a permanent, affordable home in Manhattan’s East Village. Now, the owners have announced plans for a December 5 fundraiser to help them move to a…

Begin your week with these lovely shots of the Strand Rare Book Room. Cary “Westley” Elwes is, as one might expect, writing a memoir about the making of The Princess Bride. “Compiling this Guardian/Observer list of one hundred great novels in th…

Today, George Eliot’s birthday, let us pay tribute to the sad chapter in our collective history when, in 2012, someone stole the author’s portable writing desk from the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery in Warwickshire. Having seen no updates in the …

Herewith, one million dollars worth of comic books. A new Russian app seeks to prevent e-book piracy. After years of risible purple prose, a call to celebrate good sex writing in fiction. While we’re at it, why not get some more illustrated …

Scott McClanahan’s readings are always highly memorable. As he wrote me about this, the video of his avowed final such reading ever, “I’m quitting. Yep, I’m just straight up quitting. It’s in Ohio which will make you want to quit anything…

We love this map of the modern writer’s mind, by artist Joe Dunthorne. Check out his whole interactive site here. Click to enlarge. Via the Independent.  

The NBAs (you know, the book ones) have come and gone for another year. And the winners are … Meanwhile, E. L. Doctorow, who was awarded the 2013 Medal for Distinguished Contributors to American Letters, called the Internet “ubiquitous and loomi…

“When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read b…

Charlotte Zolotow has died, at ninety-eight. So, what would Aldous Huxley do? C. S. Lewis has been inducted into the famed Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. Sales of hardcover books are surprisingly brisk.  

The miniature book The Infant’s Library. Part of the British Library’s current exhibition “Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain.”  

“There’s no method. There’s no formula. If you really proceed a sentence at a time, if you pay attention to the sentence you just wrote and look to it for the clue for what to do to the next sentence, you can inch your way along to what may be a st…

The Oxford Word of the Year is … selfie. Here is a series of cowboy poets, looking very authentically cowboy-ish indeed. Well, swell. Right-wing extremists destroyed a statue of the poet Radnóti Miklós, who died during the Holocaust, and are …

Presented without comment: the trailer for the (appropriately lurid) Lifetime adaptation of Flowers in the Attic.  

INTERVIEWER Do you have any things you would have done differently, or any advice to give? LESSING Advice I don’t go in for. The thing is, you do not believe I know everything in this field is a cliché, everything’s already been said, but you…

Doris Lessing has died at ninety-four. “The adamant child became the adamant adult. She truly had ice in her veins. She believed that her insight and her talent were unique, and she may well have been right.” Justin Cartwright pays tribute. L…

“Some of the first books I read or that my father read to me were translations, although I didn’t know they were translations because in those days the translator often wouldn’t even have his name on the book. I remember a French book, Sans famille…

The first full-cover book espresso machine comes to Books-a-Million of Portland, Maine. Bukowski in Hollywood. Google wins its epic book-scanning battle. Michiko Kakutani loves the phrase “deeply felt.”  

Amazon has launched a juggernaut of a Kindle store in Australia. The Joseph Brodsky reading list for facilitating intelligent conversation. Alison Bechdel on heading to Broadway. Writing for good health  

“There was nothing to being a lawyer except a certain amount of common sense, and relatively clean fingernails.” —John Mortimer, the Art of Fiction No. 106.  

It was not until I went away to college that I realized how much laundry my mother did. I don’t mean that my family of four generated an unusual amount—none of us changed more than once a day, or had especially extensive wardrobes—or that she …

On the wonderful blog Retronaut, this intriguing image is twinned with a caption vague to the point of inscrutability. To wit, c. 1940s:
Man with books The whole thing is rendered even more mysterious by the fact that the individual in questio…

A pretty amazing slideshow of authors shilling for products through the ages. Jonathan Franzen loves Harriet the Spy. Now really want to know his views on the even odder The Long Secret and frankly bizarre Sport. Herewith: a scratch and sniff win…

We were talking of dragons, Tolkien and I
In a Berkshire bar. The big workman
Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe
All the evening, from his empty mug
With gleaming eye glanced towards us:
‘I seen ’em myself!’ he said fiercely. —C. S. Lewis  

The Brooklyn Quarterly publishes a roundtable with five writers on the purpose and state of argumentative fiction. Compelling, unique, and poignant get 86’d from PW reviews.  Party Girl, Bunny Watson, and other amazing pop-culture librarians. T…

VONNEGUT I took my basic training on the 240-millimeter howitzer. INTERVIEWER A rather large weapon. VONNEGUT The largest mobile fieldpiece in the army at that time. This weapon came in six pieces, each piece dragged wallowingly by a Caterpill…

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 shallow for human use. (Which is probably good, consid…

We are delighted to announce that Claire Vaye Watkins has won the Dylan Thomas Prize, awarded to the best work of literature published by an author under the age of thirty, for her debut short story collection Battleborn. Read an excerpt of Watki…

ISHIGURO My first summer after leaving school I worked for the Queen Mother at Balmoral Castle, where the royal family spend their summer holidays. In those days they used to recruit local students to be grouse beaters. The royal family would invi…

“It will be fun to give some to prostitutes.” William T. Vollmann on hypothetically winning the Nobel.  BuzzFeed Books is full steam ahead. In other behemoth news, Amazon reaches out to indie bookstores about carrying Nooks. “Nah. Here I…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen will never be allowed to rest in peace but will instead, in perpetuity, act as a vague and grotesque figurehead who is required to comment on every social issue of the day, speak dialogue she ne…

Discarded books from the Birmingham Public Library become the basis for a series of pieces by local artists. P. D. James claims to have solved a 1931 cold case in the course of researching a mystery. In 1841, Edgar Allan Poe’s literary gumshoein…

While things may have been tense around Parliament Hill in the last day, let us take a moment to appreciate something lovely: the neo-Gothic wonder that is Canada’s Library of Parliament. Designed by Thomas Fuller and Chilion Jones, the 1876 stru…

“I blurb only for the dead, these days.” Margaret Atwood’s form rejection poem.  For centuries, Beowulf scholars have translated the epic’s opening line as, “Listen!” But now, Dr. George Walkden argues that “the use of the interrogative pr…

“All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it.” —Henry David Thoreau  

Remember, remember! The fifth of November, The Gunpowder treason and plot; I know of no reason Why the Gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot! Guy Fawkes and his companions Did the scheme contrive, To blow the King and Parliament All up ali…

Jane Austen scholar Paula Byrne calls the author’s likeness on the new banknote “a nineteenth-century airbrushed makeover.” The image is based on the famous portrait by Austen’s sister Cassandra. Says Byrne, “It makes me quite angry as it’s been pr…

On this day in 1899, Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) was first published. Sales were initially dismal, but the rest, of course, is psychoanalytical history. In honor of its birthday, we bring you the only known audio recording of Sigm…

Margaret Drabble: “At parties, after a few drinks, I start asking people to supper, which I always regret.” NaNoWriMo is upon us. Here are some inspirational quotes to help you get on with it. “I do not remember all the details, but I do re…

No sun—no moon!
No morn—no noon—
No dawn—no dusk—no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds!—
Novemb…

Informality, sex, reticence, and other challenges of modernizing Austen. Morrissey’s autobiography crosses the pond December 3. Starting today, Amazon.com will start collecting sales tax in Massachusetts and Connecticut. “This so, so, so over…

“I told a story a month ago, for Halloween, about the terrible pranks that were played in Lake Wobegon just before I came along that I never got to participate in. Things such as pushing over an outhouse when some sterling citizen was in it, tipp…

This would either confuse an alien who had just set foot on Earth, or maybe explain everything: the NSA haiku generator. Along similar lines: Edgar Allan Ho, which BoingBoing has anointed Best Sexy Costume 2013. (As the creator of the admittedly t…

“Soybeans really need an uplift, being on the dull side but, like dull people, respond readily to the right contacts.” —Irma S. Rombauer, The Joy of Cooking  

At Salon, poet and photographer Thomas Sayers Ellis curates a portfolio inspired by Maya Angelou. The New York Public Library now releases lists of the most checked-out books of the month, and they are exactly what one might expect. Here are ma…

My high school had a volunteer program with a local children’s home, and periodically we would throw holiday parties and carnivals. For some reason I was usually working the craft table and we always had the kids make sock puppets. It wasn’t th…

Anyone watching the CW’s Hart of Dixie last night will have noticed, at the 1:40 mark, an unexpected cameo by our very own digital director, Justin Alvarez. (You may know him as the mind behind our Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, a…

Seven haikus for failed hip-hop clothing lines. Lionel Shriver: “I have grown perversely nostalgic for my previous commercial failure—when my focus was pure, and the books were still fun to write, even if nobody read them.” An ode to litera…

INTERVIEWER Whom do you read for pleasure? WAUGH Anthony Powell. Ronald Knox, both for pleasure and moral edification. Erle Stanley Gardner. INTERVIEWER And Raymond Chandler! WAUGH No. I’m bored by all those slugs of whiskey. I don’t car…

A group of advocates is looking to establish the nation’s first literary cultural district in historically-rich Boston. Says the Globe, “Its proponents don’t know exactly where its borders will lie, or what, precisely, visitors will do, but m…

Morrissey would like to stress that he has not been consulted over any takedown request to remove the Tumblr blog named This Charming Charlie. Morrissey is represented by Warner-Chappell Publishing, and not Universal Music Publishing (who have al…

“First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.” So begins Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury’s 1962 tale of a demonic carnival that descends on a Midwestern town. I’ve long loved the 1983 Disney adaptation (which is way scarie…

From Twain to Wolfe to Tartt: authors in uniform. Fittingly enough, fisticuffs at the Norman Mailer: A Double Life party. The Asterix reboot, set in ancient Scotland, is being hailed by (a few, possibly as few as none) Scottish nationalists as an…

I’m told foxes are all the rage right now. Specifically, that “foxes are the new owls.” Owls, of course, were the new squirrels, and I forget what preceded that, but it all started with birds. And birds, as we know, are, in our post-Portlandia worl…

ELSA I was naïve. I was eighteen. I’d only had one boyfriend and never got over being shy with him, so I didn’t think of myself as holding court. I just thought, Gosh, this is fun! No good dates in high school and now all of these conversations, w…

Just a reminder to our readers: for the next five days, when you pledge to support WNYC, you can get a subscription to The Paris Review! Support public radio, and in the process receive four issues a year of poetry, fiction, interviews, and more. …

The Emily Dickinson Archive, providing digital access to the poet’s surviving ephemera, is live. And has sparked all kinds of scholarly infighting! “They have the furniture, we have the daguerreotype; they have the herbarium, we have the hair,…

Selected from AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room.  

“An assignment from a stationery retailer didn’t, at first, appear much better: they wanted an article related to writing paraphernalia for their website. But then I had an idea: what if I put something together about famous letters from hist…

LESSING I know people say things like, “I regard you as rather a prophet.” But there’s nothing I’ve said that hasn’t been, for example, in the New Scientist for the last twenty years. Nothing! So why am I called a prophet, and they are not? INTER…

Last night posed a geographical dilemma for poet, Daily contributor, and Paris Review softball outfielder Rowan Ricardo Phillips. We had known for a while that Rowan was due to receive the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry for his collectio…

Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is apparently igniting fresh interest in hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. “She had relationship issues, and I was in the same boat,” one hiker and Strayed fan tells the New York Times. A baby boy was born in a California Barne…

“I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own. But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’…

Citing health concerns, Alice Munro says she will not travel to Sweden to accept her Nobel in person. “For the first time I felt myself in the presence of a talent greater than my own.” The long, strange friendship of Kingsley Amis and Phili…

On this day in 1851, Moby-Dick was published. In a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne shortly afterward, Melville wrote, … for not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them. Appre…

Philly friends! This Sunday, I, Sadie Stein, and our editor, the estimable (and still not related) Lorin Stein will be in town as part of the 215 Festival. Great things will be taking place all weekend; we will be at the closing event at the Philad…

Go Comics has put the complete Calvin and Hobbes archive online. Read on the site, or download the app. The novels of Nicholson Baker. In nail art. Can you guess which books inspired these fictitious food scenes? Or, the quiz some of us have be…

I spent far too long staring at this T-shirt, number thirty-seven in BuzzFeed’s gallery of literary paraphernalia. I mean, I understand the basic concept: the wearer is reading, and would prefer not to be bothered. The garment is in the grand tra…

“Being a playwright was always the maximum idea. I’d always felt that the theater was the most exciting and the most demanding form one could try to master. When I began to write, one assumed inevitably that one was in the mainstream that began wit…

College Humor improves bestsellers with click-bait titles (although we would have said Eat, Pray, Love was doing okay already). The rough guide to why Penguin Classics is publishing Morrissey’s autobiography. The most specific niche calendar ev…

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” ―Oscar Wilde  

For the past week and a half, New York City straphangers have been hearing an unusual announcement during their commutes. “Police are seeking a missing child, Avonte Oquendo, fourteen. He suffers from autism and cannot communicate verbally.” Th…

At the Bookers, twenty-eight-year-old Eleanor Catton won the fiction prize for the hefty, historical The Luminaries, becoming the youngest-ever recipient. Meanwhile, stateside, the National Book Awards have listed their finalists. Bookish NYC gen…

“I don’t know why spats went out! The actual name was spatterdashers, and you fastened them over your ankles, you see, to prevent the spatter dashing you. They certainly lent tone to your appearance, and they were awfully comfortable, especially …

Behind the scenes at the Booker Prize! The lurid image is not misleading. We are not inclined to argue with the authority of this headline: “Here Is the One Perfect Book for Every Single Myers-Briggs Type.” “Well-meaning adults can easily d…

“I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.” ―Katherine Mansfield  

“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” ―Elmore Leonard  

At the Henry Review, Joshua Cohen reads from his novel-in-progress. A poetry shutdown begins, and poets and critics fail to reach a compromise. “It is honest only to the degree that it builds its precise and inescapable box around its maker’s…

“Well, I have no relationship to her. I’ve never met her. And as for her work, I came to it too late probably for it even to have been an influence, which fills me with despair. I am merely a big fan. She is a great artist, alive and among us, …

“Often, in about three quarters of what I do, I reach a point somewhere, fairly early on, when I think I’m going to abandon this story. I get myself through a day or two of bad depression, grouching around. And I think of something else I can w…

Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The citation called the Canadian writer (the second Canadian laureate, if we count Saul Bellow) a “master of the contemporary short story.” Ten things you need to know about Alice Munro. Need, peo…

Selected from AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room.  

Shame! Librarians tell all. “I think that Napoleon was a terrific guy before he started crossing national borders. Over the course of time, his temperament changed, and his behavior was insensitive to the nations he occupied. Through greed—whi…

I bought my first early-eighties Harlequin Romance—actually, it was a Mills & Boon—when I was working at a thrift store in London. This was, without question, the worst job I have ever had. Does it count as a job if it’s volunteer work? Anyway,…

Alternatively: All of these people? By all means, join the discussion!  

J. D. Salinger worked as an entertainment director on a luxury liner. And other odd jobs of literary greats. “Few readers know that Edgar had an older brother. Typically going by the name Henry, he was a poet, like his famous sibling, and a hard…

  This interactive Bay Area Literary Map, courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle, is fantastic, and because we are greedy, we want one for every city in the world.  

From the Richmond Semi-Weekly Examiner, vol. II, no. 98, October 12, 1849: EDGAR ALLAN POE died in Baltimore on Sunday last. His was one of the very few original minds that this country has produced. In the history of literature, he will hold a ce…

“I would love to write some music for Game of Thrones … I’ve written a bunch of poetry about it—one for each other characters. On Jon Snow … On Arya … On Cersei and Jaime.” Stevie Nicks in Westeros.  “I never really expected that th…

We are delighted to report that our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, has won the 2013 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. In addition to his work here at the Review, Robyn teaches comparative literature at Brown University. His critical work focuses …

New York’s Center for Jewish History is opening the David Berg Rare Book Room, which will feature, amongst others, Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, and Emma Lazarus. A Vermont man has pleaded guilty to stealing (and selling) a number of Robert Frost…

“I had to be more disciplined than ever about my work schedule; after the first book was turned in, I would have approximately ten months to plot, research, and write each novel. The deadline left no wiggle room—my publisher had pre-sold the books …

“I can’t remember when I was not writing. I was taught to read by my grandmother. Central to her method was a tale of unnatural love called ‘The Duck and the Kangaroo.’ Then, because my grandfather, Senator Gore, was blind, I was required early on to…

“It’s not like Klingon or anything. It is reasonable to believe it once existed. But nobody every wrote it down so we don’t know exactly what ‘it’ really was. Instead, what we know is that there are hundreds of languages that share simila…

“My business career lasted for a fortnight. They were a firm, I remember, of tobacco merchants. I was to go up to Leeds to learn the business and then go abroad. I couldn’t stand my companion. He was an insufferable bore. We would play double nou…

Full disclosure: I once played Charlie Brown in a summer-camp production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. It was a deeply scarring experience. I hate Peanuts. It feels good to admit that. Today marks the sixty-third birthday of Peanuts. Here i…

There are so many wooden legs in the works of Dickens. David Bowie’s one hundred favorite books include The Trial of Henry Kissinger, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. “You’ve published a novel, and ha…

The Paris Review is partnering with the Standard, East Village to find a Writer-in-Residence. The idea is this: in January, a writer with a book under contract will get a room at the Standard, East Village, in downtown Manhattan, for three weeks…

“He had never liked October. Ever since he had first lay in the autumn leaves before his grandmother’s house many years ago and heard the wind and saw the empty trees. It had made him cry, without a reason. And a little of that sadness returned each …

Fave: yet another word with a surprisingly venerable history. A bookie’s take on the Nobel Prize in Literature. “Fame has a dark side. When Times New Roman ap­pears in a book, doc­u­ment, or ad­ver­tise­ment, it con­notes ap­a­thy. I…

“I had to go into town on Saturdays to the dentist and I joined the Sunshine Club that was organized by the Mobile Press Register. There was a children’s page with contests for writing and for coloring pictures, and then every Saturday afternoon th…

In honor of the seventy-fifth anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath, playwright Octavio Solis, writer Patricia Wakida, and filmmaker P. J. Palmer will retrace the Oklahoma-to-California journey of the Joad family. Along Route 66, they plan to collect …

  The Wiljax Gallery of Cleveland, Mississippi, is featuring a selection of Eudora Welty’s Depression-era photographic portraits, which the young writer developed and printed herself in her Jackson kitchen. It was the first time many of her subje…

The beleaguered Edgar Allan Poe House, in Baltimore, will re-open to visitors weekends in October, prior to its official reopening in spring 2014. A survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts finds, depressingly, that less than half o…

Paper Typerwriter, 2011, by Jennifer Collier. Vintage typewriter manual pages, gray board, and machine stitching. Via Art Made from Books: Altered Sculptured, Carved, Transformed.  

Those with an appetite for funeral baked meats and a few mil burning the proverbial hole, NB: Elmore Leonard’s Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, estate can be yours. “His jeans are all lined up, his shoes are all perfect … I’ve never seen a closet so org…

“Wine plays an important role in Fifty Shades of Grey. I’ve always had a penchant for good wine, so combining two of my passions … was a natural extension of the series.” The foremost entrepreneur of our times, E. L. James, is launching a line of…

When we posted a recitation of “Ode to a Nightingale,” a reader noted that F. Scott Fitzgerald also made a recording of the Keats poem. That audio is great, but on the occasion of the author’s birthday, we thought we’d share another: Fitzge…

Herewith, the most-challenged books of 2013. Leading the pack is Captain Underpants. Virgule, pilcrow, and other extinct punctuation. “You can imagine a modern-day Charlotte Brontë writing embarrassing confessional scenes about masturbation, L…

This Dewar’s ad uses words (well, some of them) from Charles Bukowski’s “so you want to be a writer?” While it is all very sweeping and epic and generally the most movingly crass blend of commerce and poetry since Walt Whitman started shilli…

Poet Kofi Awoonor was among the victims of the Nairobi terrorist attacks. The African Poetry Book Fund will publish his final collection next year. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal runs one of his last poems. Following charges of author-bullying…

“Where’s the man that could ease a heart like a satin gown?” and other instances of lingerie in literature. (Yes, completely SFW.)  

Fresh on the heels of her recent settlement, eighty-seven-year-old Harper Lee is now at loggerheads with the Monroe County Heritage Museum in her hometown of Monroeville. The small museum is largely devoted to To Kill a Mockingbird; Lee is seeking …

When the world heard about the shooting prompted by a dispute over Immanuel Kant, we simultaneously recoiled at the violence and wondered that a work of philosophy should prompt such passions. Could it happen in America, we asked? Perhaps we have o…

We at The Paris Review are big fans of the Brooklyn Book Festival. There’s always a calendar of terrific events, and we never miss a chance to set up shop in Borough Hall Plaza. We love sharing our latest issue with people, and seeing reps from o…

  “Walter White is a bigger monster than anyone in Westeros.” —George R. R. Martin  

Quoth Patrick Hemingway, “I’m not a great fan of Vanity Fair. It’s a sort of luxury thinker’s magazine, for people who get their satisfaction out of driving a Jaguar instead of a Mini.” VF rejected his dad’s story “My Life in the Bull Ring With D…

Paper and Salt, a blog devoted to food and literature, is consistently excellent. In a recent post, author Nicole Villeneuve draws attention to a little-discussed aspect of Thomas Pynchon’s writing: his recurring interest in Mexican food. Why, sh…

During an argument over the works of Immanuel Kant, a Russian man was shot in the head. He is, shockingly, not seriously hurt, but the shooter faces up to a decade in jail for “intentional infliction of bodily harm.” The distinguished poet Gra…

Tonight at the Powerhouse Arena: Lawrence Block, Chip McGrath, and Lorin Stein on John O’Hara, moderated by Steven Goldleaf. See you there!   

On this day in 1919, Maxwell Perkins accepted twenty-two-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise for publication. The novel had started as a shorter piece called The Education of a Personage; following a breakup with future wife Zelda …

Presented without comment: The Jewish Hunger Games: Kvetching Fire. (One comment: yes, it is about Yom Kippur.) Word is, the Man Booker may open its doors to Yank authors come 2014. Needless to say, this is controversial. Electric Lit starts an… …

Earlier this week, we hosted an AMA on Reddit: all the editors clustered around Lorin’s desk, while Stephen typed, and we addressed as many queries as we could. It was fun, and exhausting, and we were delighted and impressed with the caliber of que…

“For the record, I am not overly fond of chocolate-flavoured foods such as chocolate cake and chocolate ice-cream. I prefer my chocolate straight.” —Roald Dahl, The Chocolate Revolution  

The Princeton University library has digitized the manuscript of This Side of Paradise and made it available online. What if famous authors did have Instagram accounts? What indeed? Upon her death, an Ohio librarian quietly donated her life savin…

What if William Carlos Williams wrote passive-aggressive notes in your office?  

  San Francisco-based Arion Press—the last full-service letterpress in America—is in pursuit of the perfect book. “Think of such trends in titles as the publishing industry’s version of ombré hair or white Chuck Taylors.” The word land in tit…

Every year, the Rona Jaffe Awards recognize the contributions of women writers. This year’s honorees are Tiffany Briere, Ashlee Crews, Margaree Little, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Jill Sisson Quinn, and Paris Review contributor Kristin Dombek. Hearty con…

“I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.” ―D. H. Lawrence, letter to Cynthia Asquith, 1913  

A federal grant will help the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center—based in the author’s Hartford home—to stay open. Middlemarch, in emojis. A map plots the location of every Booker Prize nominee since 1969. London leads the pack, at thirty-eight. Tumb…

On Sunday, I saw Salinger. Having seen the trailer, not to mention the posters, my companions and I had reason to expect a certain degree of bombast. As such, we came armed with skepticism and whiskey, hoping to hear some interesting interviews, se…

“The FBI kept a file on noted dirty old man Charles Bukowski.” Indian author Sushmita Banerjee, whose writing inspired the film Escape from Taliban, was killed in Afghanistan on Wednesday. “What I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow …

“The best stories don’t come from ‘good vs. bad’ but ‘good vs. good.’” —Leo Tolstoy  

“We’re trying to reorder some of the myths based on the documents.” Bolaño’s unpublished work, on view in Spain. Harper Lee and agent Samuel Pinkus have apparenty reached an “agreement in principle” to settle the eighty-seven-year-old…

All of Tolstoy’s works are going online. “We wanted to come up with an official website that will contain academically justified information,” explains his great-great-granddaughter. The work on the site will have been triple-proofed by more …

These miniature landscapes, painted on the sides of nineteenth-century books, were recently discovered at the University of Iowa. Jokes (of varying degrees of hilarity) for grammar nerds. Adding to the indignity of Richard III’s parking-lot exh…

Joey Ramone sings John Cage adapting Finnegans Wake. Got that? Paul Muldoon’s eulogy for Seamus Heaney. Fans of the Fifty Shades series are outraged at the casting for the upcoming film adaptations; a petition is circulating and already boasts 7,…

William Faulkner’s drawings from his Ole Miss days are wonderfully Deco. Random House UK launches The Happy Foodie, described thusly: “Bringing cookery books to life, helping you get happy in the kitchen.” In other slogan-y UK books new…

“I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people’s necks.” —Seamus Heaney, the Art of Poetry No. 75  

Seamus Heaney has died, at the age of seventy-four. The Guardian brings us a number of his inimitable recordings. The Nuyorican Poets Café celebrates its fortieth birthday. In yet more poetry news: Alberto Rios is Arizona’s first poet laureat…

“I don’t regret the present. I don’t feel it’s cheap and tawdry compared with the past. I think the past was cheap and tawdry too.” —Thom Gunn, the Art of Poetry No. 72  

Oxford Dictionary Online (not to be confused with older sibling OED) has added twerk, derp, and selfie. “I have realized that the traditional omelet form (eggs and cheese) is bourgeois. Today I tried making one out of a cigarette, some coffee, a…

“Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.” —John Betjeman  

Behold: an analog typewriter printer that uses ink made from zebra-finch droppings. A massive archive of Charles Bukowski’s manuscripts and letters is now available online at Bukowski.net. Anthony Bourdain, Selena Gomez, and other popular stars…

We urge you to check out this gallery of alternative Shakespeare covers.   

“I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely.” —Jeanette Winterson, the Art of Fiction No. 150  

“Want to lose a friend who’s a writer? Ask her, a month in, how it’s going. Better still, ask her to describe what she’s working on.” Mark Slouka explains the etiquette.  The great affect/effect problem. Libraries across Quebec are b…

Paul Rogers has made “an illustrated scroll” in which he illustrates a line from every page of On the Road.  

Friends! We are thrilled to announce that this fall, when you pledge to support WNYC, you can get a subscription to The Paris Review! That’s right: keep public radio going strong, and while you’re at it receive four issues a year of poetry, fiction, …

We like this slideshow of images from the Hargeisa International Book Fair, but are somewhat confused by the headline “Somaliland goes crazy for books.” According to the upcoming Salinger documentary, the famous recluse instructed his estate to pu…

Of teaching Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries c…

At various points, the FBI suspected William Vollmann of being the Unabomber, the anthrax mailer, and a terrorist training with the Afghan mujahideen. “Reviewers have the right to rate a book however they feel like, with absolutely no justificat…

“You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices.” —Ray Bradbury, the Art of Fiction No. 203  

Beatrice Kozera, the real-life inspiration for “Terry, the Mexican girl” in On the Road, has died, at ninety-two. Apparently she only learned of her involvement a few years ago.  Monica Ali is one of the new faces of Marks and Spencer. “In a…

In the words of my colleague Justin Alvarez, “Holy Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill’s underpants finally for sale!” Well, for a cool $1,750. The shop’s owner captioned the shorts “longjohn’s journey into night.” Seriously, we can do this all day.  

Labeling it gay propaganda, an official in the Saratov region of Russia has called for the removal of LGBT history book Gays: They Changed the World (pictured above) from bookstore shelves. “When you meet somebody who bores you, you have to put …

“I don’t like a lot of description. I like to judge for myself what a character looks like from the way he talks. I picked up on that immediately. I thought, That’s the way to go, just keep the characters talking and the reader will discover …

Twain’s notebooks, Plath’s pens, and other preferred writing paraphernalia of famous authors. Via the minds at McSweeney’s, an invaluable Field Guide to Uncommon Punctuation. An elaborate, book-themed proposal involving a custom children’…

If you weren’t able to catch James Salter, Mona Simpson, Lorin Stein, and John Jeremiah Sullivan talking The Paris Review’s sixtieth on Friday night’s Charlie Rose (or, like some of us, were forced to watch it in closed caption), you’re in luck! …

“Literature is not different from life, it is part of life. And for someone like myself, The Odyssey is as much a part of nature as the Aegean. And I react to the Aegean—as distinct, say, from the Caribbean—because its history is part of its ph…

  Shocking, shocking: a Seattle thief has stolen the Books on Bikes librarian’s bicycle. Thankfully, the trailer of books was not attached. “Sixty percent of the thirty-six books recommended for four-to-eight-year-olds feature animals, or…

One Friday evening in March, I took the train to Columbia University and walked into one of the strangest and most interesting classes I’d ever seen. It was the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, part of the Mellon Visiting Artists and Thinkers P…

“The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.” —Julia Child  

Sci-fi or fantasy fan? Hie on over to Tor.com, where the site is celebrating its fifth birthday by giving away a free anthology. A class at the University of Utah will examine the Book of Mormon as literature. The actual book, not the musical. The …

This Chart of Famous Eyewear is amazing—I think even those of you with perfect eyesight will agree—and the literary world is well-represented by the frames of, respectively, Hunter S. Thompson, Harry Potter, and Dolores Haze. But whither the grea…

Kafka cameos in a Charmin toilet paper commercial; one of those incontinent bears is a fan, apparently. “But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two…

Selected from AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room.  

Many congratulations go out to our frequent contributor and sometimes outfielder Rowan Ricardo Phillips, whose book The Ground has just won the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. The Osterweil “recognizes the high literary character of the …

  In the immortal words of David Cross, “When you misuse the word literally, you are using it in the exact opposite way it was intended.” He must be dismayed at the growing usage of its “informal” meaning. Is comedic literature making a…

What were you doing this past Sunday? Something special, we hope. Because this past Sunday, the eleventh of August, was the seventy-sixth anniversary of an amazing event. And we cannot improve upon the concise description of our diligent friends a…

I am perfectly willing to believe that The Novelist, a video game that follows the quotidian struggles of a writer named Dan Kaplan, is a thought-provoking exercise for anyone who plays and an interesting evolution in the way we think of gaming. I …

A tribute to the Blackwing 602, the favored pencil of many a writer, including Nabokov. The saga of the Jane Austen ring continues! Now, an anonymous donor has given £100,000 to prevent Kelly Clarkson from spiriting the gold and topaz bauble off to…

Tonight, join editor Lorin Stein at McNally Jackson as he talks with Caleb Crain about his acclaimed new novel, Necessary Errors. See you there! Monday, August 12, 7–8:30 P.M.
McNally Jackson
52 Prince Street
New York City, NY 10012  

Via Bullitt County History.  

Anonymouth is a computer program designed to strip text of stylistic markers and, in the words of The New Republic, “turn famous writers into anonymous hacks,” should this be your desire. Meanwhile, libraries are increasingly dependent on com…

Seattle artist James Allen creates “Book Excavations” by cutting away layers of pages.  

“I draw a hot sorrow bath in my despair room.” This quote, by Keanu Reeves, is part of an anthology called Wretched Writing. Herewith, the Kill Your Darlings trailer, featuring Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg. Meet idiosyncratic Houston-…

With the man I love who loves me not
      I walked in the street-lamps’ flare —
But oh, the girls who ask for love
      In the lights of Union Square. —Sara Teasdale, “Union Square”  

“I don’t want to kill you”: a summer camp based on The Hunger Games.  To Be Or Not To Be: That Is the Adventure is, yes, a choose-your-own-adventure take on Hamlet. George Saunders’s much-lauded Syracuse graduation speech is being turned into …

Jane Austen’s ascendency to the rank of currency has inspired our friends at AbeBooks to suggest a series of literary bills. Perhaps our favorite is this Margaret Atwood $20 note—not least because it is she who once wrote, in Payback: Debt and th…

Texas writer John Graves, author of Goodbye to a River, has died at ninety-two. The secret—but public—New York City Hall Library. “9 Popular Yet Terrible Kids Books,” a doubtless controversial list. An infographic charts the incidence …

Why should you never stay in room 1212? When should you tip the concierge? How can you raid your minibar—for free? Learn the answers to these and other shameful but reasonable questions tomorrow at noon when Paris Review editor Lorin Stein intervie…

Via the 92nd Street Y.  

“Over the years, I’d purchased books on Indian philosophy, Nepali architecture, alpine flowers, Hatha yoga, spirit possession, as well as old copies of The Paris Review, and I frequented the store long enough to see my own collection of short stori…

Check out those shorts second from the right. Your eyes do not deceive you: that is indeed the very same 1953 William Pène du Bois cityscape that graces the inside cover of your issue of The Paris Review. It’s one of four designs, taken from our …

“Do what we can, summer will have its flies.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson  

Sherman Alexie’s National Book Award–winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian has been pulled from the PS 114 sixth-grade reading list based on the following: “And if God hadn’t wanted us to masturbate, then God wouldn’t have g…

As a child, I had a morbid fear of the Shelley sonnet “Ozymandias.” (In the pantheon of night terrors, it ranked only behind the cover of the Sweeney Todd LP, which lived in our living room, and the ghost of Ty Cobb, who lived in my closet.) I guess …

Thwarted in her quest to bring Jane Austen’s One Ring to the U.S., singer Kelly Clarkson has been forced to commission a replica. The Amazon powers that be have ensured that Vonnegut fan fic is now legal, and one can buy it via Amazon. “Bill…

An abandoned Walmart in McAllen, Texas, is now the largest single-floor public library in America. The 124,500 square foot space contains sixty-four computer labs—three for teenagers, ten for children, two specifically devoted to genealogy—an a…

And we mean that literally: this is a Tumblr of fan fic based on TV advertisements. And is there more fallow ground than this strange world of smart-aleck kids, idiot husbands, knowing wives, yogurt-eating singles, and maniacally friendly fast-food w…

“So many other good books … don’t waste your time on this one. J. D. Salinger went into hiding because he was embarrassed.” And other one-star Amazon reviews of classics. Anthony Weiner spokesperson Barbara Morgan’s recent rant against a campa…

We love Holly Pilot.  

It takes some work to decipher this infographic charting writers in prison for nonliterary crimes, but we like that it exists. Larry McMurtry’s epic rare-book auction is now the subject of a documentary. The band Heaven’s new single, “Dandelion W…

Close watchers of this space may observe that we have, in the past, posted the iconic video for “Wuthering Heights.” But when we realized that today was not just Emily Brontë’s birthday but also Kate Bush’s, well, you can see that we had no alternati…

Brain Pickings’s Maria Popova has curated a fantastic selection of books for the New York Public Library’s bookstore. And that’s not all: artist Kelli Anderson did a 3-D papercraft display based on the chosen books, which, in turn, was made i…

“But ultimately, I decided that the committees overseeing these sorts of things (editorial, sales, marketing) would never approve this. ‘The title is hard to read,’ they would complain. ‘The book is hard to read,’ I would silently retort. ‘That…

From Modern Drunkard: Carson liked sherry with her tea, brandy with her coffee, and her purse with a large flask of whiskey. Between books, when she was neither famous nor monied, she claimed she existed almost exclusively on gin, cigarettes, and de…

Yes, she may be known for her anthropomorphic animals, but Beatrix Potter’s studies of local flora and fauna show an entirely different side: that of the committed naturalist and conservationist.  

We all know OMG has some years on it, but, as it turns out, so do unfriend, outasight, and hang out. Some leaves, woman holding a birdcage for some reason, and seventeen other contemporary book-cover clichés. According to a study in the Journal o…

Jane Austen is indeed replacing Darwin on the £10 note. Margaret Atwood has written an opera, fifteen years in development, about the poet Pauline Johnson. The letters of Roald Dahl, spanning most of his life, will be published in 2016. This ma…

While we enjoyed the book-inspired ice cream flavors the good people at HuffPo Books put together for National Ice Cream Month, it got us pondering a very real question: How is it that, given their sensibilities and aesthetic, Ben & Jerry’s has n…

From the terrific Britannica Blog, a noteworthy page from the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, 1768.  

Meet The Wizard of Jeanz. It consists of twenty-one volumes, each a chapter of The Wizard of Oz that, when unfolded, turns into an article of clothing. Designer Hiroaki Ohya says he was “disillusioned with the transitory nature of fashion … [a…

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald on the Riviera in 1926. In a letter from that year, Fitzgerald wrote,  There was no one at Antibes this summer, except me, Zelda, the Valentinos, the Murphys, Mistinguet, Rex Ingram, Dos Passos, Alice Terry, the MacL…

Herewith: the Man Booker Prize long list. “I just happen to love ampersands,” says David Gilbert of his decision to title his new novel & Sons. Arrested Development’s Jeffrey Tambor, as it happens, is part owner of LA’s estimable Skylight Books…

While all of this 1952 Ford Foundation Omnibus film—a sort of scripted documentary on William Faulkner—is fantastic, bizarre, and well worth watching, this clip is particularly noteworthy for the exterior shots of the author’s house, Rowan Oak.  

“Tall, aren’t you?” she said. “I didn’t mean to be.” Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her. —Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep  

Wine for Dummies (yes, like the books) is a real thing, and will shortly be presented to any host who invites me to dinner. In case you were wondering, this summer, Bill Gates will be reading, among other things, The Box: How the Shipping Containe…

“If it could only be like this always—always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper …” So says Sebastian Flyte of his teddy bear, one of the most memorable minor characters in Brideshead Revisited. Both affectatio…

  While the thesis of this article—that business travelers still enjoy reading—may seem less than revelatory, we were intrigued by the following anecdote: Carrying a book while traveling often spurs conversations with strangers, many busine…

The mysterious book sculptor of Edinburgh has struck again. Reads the card (perhaps intended to clarify things for those who wondered if the work was antibook), “In support of libraries, books, words & ideas.” “Why do writers drink? Why does a…

In July of 2001—I was in college at the time, working as a part-time waitress and part-time fact-checker—I found myself on Canal Street on a sweltering afternoon. It had been a long and unglamorous summer, hot in the way everyone knows from New…

I had, I admit, become a jaded infographic skeptic. No more! I said to myself. And then, one day, in the midst of a heat wave, you run across an infographic so intriguing, so well laid-out, so Linnaean, that you think: Yes. I am a human being and man…

A first edition of The Cuckoo’s Calling—signed by Robert Galbraith—has sold on AbeBooks for $4,453 (£2,950), and the remaining copy is listed for $6,193.24. Anyway, now we know who leaked J. K. Rowling’s identity: her law firm. “Almost Like C…

The results of Book Riot’s “Books you pretend to have read” survey are in, and they’re explosive. While the usual lengthy suspects—Ulysses, Moby-Dick, Infinite Jest—are represented, Pride and Prejudice is a surprise dark horse number-one. (Maybe afte…

Here is a page of Finnegans Wake put through spell-check. What your e-mail opener means. What your e-mail sign-off means. The anatomy of a book cover. And, without further ado, the Malcolm Gladwell book generator.  

Hemingway Days, the annual Key West celebration of all things Papa, takes place from July 16–21 this year. Scheduled events include thematic lectures by Hemingway experts, readings, cocktail parties, a silent auction, a marlin derby, and, of course…

Remember: today is Take Your Poet to Work Day. Full instructions for toting your preferred wordsmith can be found here; an excerpt is below. (Since a poster-size version of this picture glowers over the Paris Review kitchen, I think we’ve got it co…

“Everyone on earth has one good book in them,” and other bad advice for aspiring writers.  A young man who stole eight hundred books from a single store, in search of the meaning of life, says, “I couldn’t comprehend the meaning of life…

This is a 3-D orihon, or accordion book, made by Chicago artist and teacher Tom Burtonwood, and developed for the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College.  

The picturesque West Sussex cottage where William Blake lived, sometimes nude, from 1800–1803 (the period during which he wrote “Jerusalem”) is on the market for £650,000. The agent says, “The original part of the cottage has been altered …

In 1948, Richard Wright starred in this screen test for the film adaptation of his classic 1940 novel, Native Son. Says Studio 360’s Amanda Aronczyk, “if that sounds like a bad idea, that’s because it was”—not least because the non-actor wa…

By now, you are probably aware that J. K. Rowling wrote detective novel The Cuckoo’s Calling under the guise of Robert Galbraith, an ex-military family man. Quoth she, “It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasu…

This infographic on “the psychology of abandonment”—that is, why we don’t finish certain books—makes for fun reading. But even more interesting is the Goodreads list of those titles most frequently abandoned. We don’t want to spoil Stieg Larsson …

Reading University is now the proud owner of “almost certainly the most important English language manuscript still in private hands,” a six-notebook draft of Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. (The damage? A cool [almost] one million pounds.) When writers …

Brain Pickings has posted a wonderful gallery of Edward Gorey’s Doubleday paperback covers, designed between 1953 and 1960. Some, like The War of the Worlds and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, feel like an obvious match for Gorey’s brand of Go…

  This speaks for itself: Pride and Prejudice mashed up with Parks and Recreation. Take this (anonymous) survey: What books do you pretend to have read? Shockingly, famously gregarious joiner J. D. Salinger was no fan of book clubs. S…

Tomorrow, our own Hailey Gates will be reading at not one but two events in Manhattan. At 6:30 P.M., catch her reading her own work at the Fleur du Mal popup at Clic Gallery (255 Centre Street). Come 7:30 P.M., we’ll be heading over to Le Poisso…

For those of you looking to go down some seriously deep rabbit holes or just appreciate the outsider art that is Wikipedia prose at its best, may we suggest this beautifully curated list of the fifty most interesting articles on Wikipedia? While thi…

Reading can affect the behavior of those who identify strongly with the central characters, a new study (and a million Twi-hards) finds. In other research news: a controversial linguistics study suggests that high altitude can directly impact th…

“It would be too simple to say this is any ordinary cheese with the blues—it’s dense with flavor, care and feeling. The Bayley Hazen has a balanced mix of flavors that range from buttered toast, to chocolate and hazelnuts, and even the dark bit…

  A twelve-foot fiberglass Mr. Darcy is currently standing in the middle of Hyde Park’s Serpentine Lake, and is terrifying. A new analytics tool claims it can detect sarcasm in online comments. But the best part: “Its clients include the …

This song, “Dear Joseph,” comes courtesy of Australian group t:dy t:wns. As they explain it, “My friend and I wrote a song about an airplane trip I took where I was distracted from reading my Paris Review by my seat mate, a guy named Joseph, who w…

  “This ‘immortal’ pilferer of other men’s stories and ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debati…

  “‘I’ll have to calm down a bit. Or else I’ll burst with happiness.’” —Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness  

George Plimpton’s passion for fireworks is legendary: he devoted a book to the subject, and held the title of Fireworks Commissioner of New York for some thirty years. In 2011, his son, Taylor, wrote movingly about sending his father’s ashes into spa…

“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love a…

On the manifold benefits of writing by hand. In which the author teaches Victorian literature to embryo accountants. Germany adopts shitstorm. Or, as the Beeb would have it, “English rude word enters German language.” Oh dear: the Chicago Sun-Time…

This infographic on hours spent reading per week is fascinating.  

The Bible: soon to be a twelve-volume, two-thousand-page comic book with “sizzling art.” (Not drawn by God.) Toronto mayor and possible crack enthusiast Rob Ford has inspired a whole bunch of real-person fan fic. In surprising news, new resea…

What makes this so compelling is that the cat is really poring over the text. CORRECTION: The cat’s owner has written in to inform us that not only is Boris literate, he is reading Tennyson!  

As he noted on the same page, “The tango is a brothel dance. Of this I have no doubt.”  

“Today I broke through the chains of oppression. No longer will page numbers tyrannize my life. I … have taken action,” declares one impassioned Infinite Jest reader. Would DFW approve? Meet Flaneur magazine, each issue of which is dedicated to …

I think we can all agree that what this day needs is Joan Crawford dramatically reading Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music.”  

Hogarth is launching a new series in which modern writers reinterpret Shakespeare. First up: Anne Tyler does The Taming of the Shrew, while Jeanette Winterson takes on The Winter’s Tale. In their own words: “We at Author’s Promoter thought it …

Behold what is either the best or worst rejection letter we have ever seen (depending on your capacity for cruelty), sent to Gertrude Stein in 1912 by publisher Arthur C. Fifield. Given that the manuscript in question became Three Lives (among other …

The Tweet pictured above really speaks for itself. And another one down: Chicago’s oldest used bookstore, the eccentric and beloved O’Gara and Wilson Antiquarian Booksellers, is closing its venerable Hyde Park location. But all is not lost: th…

You will be relieved to learn that Arthur C. Clarke’s DNA is going where no man has gone before. Prior to his 2008 death, the science fiction legend graciously donated several strands of hair to NASA’s “first ever solar sail mission into deep…

Flavorwire has outdone itself with this slideshow of authors’ wedding pictures. (Yup: that’s Hemingway and Hadley.) R.I.P. Nook—we hardly knew ya. (Which is, I suppose, the problem.) Reports of Leonard Cohen’s death, on the other hand, …

Richard Matheson, the screenwriter and author of (among others) I Am Legend, A Stir of Echoes, and What Dreams May Come, has died, at eighty-seven. Below, watch a pre-Kirk William Shatner in the Matheson-penned Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at …

A new app, Placing Literature, lets you find literary landmarks and bookstores wherever your travels take you. For your delectation: ten bookish restaurants. (We want to go to Café Kafka.) Everyone knows the original Little Mermaid—walking on knive…

On this day in 1843, the cynic, journalist, and satirist Ambrose Bierce was born in Ohio. It’s his death that’s in question; in 1913 the seventy-one-year-old writer disappeared without a trace (probably) somewhere in Mexico, while (possibly) tr…

So what’s with all the women’s backs on book covers? “Could I have chosen my own genius and condition, I would have made myself a great poet,” said John Quincy Adams. Judge for yourself. A school librarian has discovered that a poem calle…

“Generally one would like to avoid tricking oneself.” —Ian McEwan, the Art of Fiction No. 173  

“Why aren’t there more novels about Quaker worship?”

Anonymous, bookish sculptures have been popping up at Scottish libraries. “It’s nice to go out with a bang”: Alice Munro may (or may not) retire. This will, predicts The New Republic, result in the sort of tedious furor that accompanies any such …

Well, this is fantastic. In 1889, British prime minister William Gladstone decided to make his 32,000-book library available to the public. Further, he envisioned the space (located in Wales) as a sort of scholarly hotel, at which visitors might s…

Maurice Sendak illustrates Tolstoy. And speaking of collaborations! Appropriately enough, there is now an interactive app for William Shakespeare’s Star Wars. Everyone loves Bloomsday; why no Dalloway Day? (Dalloday?) Ten words for which we coul…

“More than kisses, letters mingle souls.”* —John Donne *Not those of first cousins, except in the platonic sense.  

In “Expired,” photographer Kerry Mansfield works with discarded books, to eerie effect. How Orwell, Voltaire, and Ann Landers chose their pen names. Meet Simon Vance, the name (or voice!) in audiobooks. Stephen King published Joyland with lofty,…

Behold the typewriters of famous authors. Speaking of: if you have $60,000–$80,000 handy, you can buy Hemingway’s. MESSAGES SENT WITHIN THE U.S. NAVY NO LONGER HAVE TO BE WRITTEN OUT IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. In other cultural upheaval news, b…

Herewith: the Seattle Public Library sets a 2,131-book domino-chain world record.  

We were thrilled to run across this custom bike helmet, modeled on the 2666 cover designed by Charlotte Strick (who just happens to be The Paris Review’s art editor!). Says Ariel Abrahams, who commissioned the literary topper, I chose my desig…

An Irish press is publishing a collection of ten short pieces by James Joyce, calling it “almost certainly the last undiscovered title” by the author. But did Joyce want them published at all? Scholars choose sides. Speaking of cashing in, …

When I was a junior in college, I treated my creative writing seminar to a story that was, even by my standards, bizarre. (I don’t mean experimental, or particularly interesting, by the way—just peculiar.) It was a piece of—well, I guess you’d call…

A California library introduces a children’s book vending machine! The perfect number of children for literary success: a slideshow.  As dirt goes, this seems pretty tame, but: it seems Avril Danica Haines, nominated as CIA number two, used to…

“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” —W. B. Yeats  

Of Mr. Capote’s prose it is hard to speak temperately. It is some sort of jargon quite unfamiliar to me. Of the information he seeks to convey, I am no judge. I have a distant acquaintance with a few of the subjects. Mr. Cecil Beaton I have known, no…

Flooring. Made of books. “New Canadian research finds reading a literary short story increases one’s comfort with ambiguity.” ’Nuff said, really.  Finland’s passport doubles as an excellent moose-themed flipbook, as it should. Notes on …

Artist Ekaterina Panikanova paints on old books. As you can see, the results are extraordinary.  

A London street artist, with an apparent interest in Middle English, paints, among other motifs, scenes from The Canterbury Tales. In one day—well, a day filled with further NSA surveillance revelations—1984’s Amazon sales jumped 6,021%. Seat…