At one point in Ben Lerner’s new book, “10:04,” the narrator visits the studio space of his lover, Alena. Alena’s latest project…
Here’s a joke: what’s the name of that one Haruki Murakami novel with the aimless, somewhat developmentally-arrested thirty-something protagonist who likes pasta…
On April 7th, Toni Morrison spoke to a packed house – so packed that many faculty were stranded outside, forced to watch…
Faced with the spiritually truncating demands of modernity, the twentieth-century idealist, as described by André Breton in the “First Manifesto of Surrealism,”…
Despairing of the writer’s condition under the Soviet Union, Mikhail Bulgakov burned the first draft of “The Master and Margarita” in 1930.…
In a very different world, today would be 5 December 92 p.s.U., or the fifth day of the twelfth month of the…
In 2011, Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for “The Sense of an Ending.” It was the first novel he had…
Thomas Pynchon was something of a Terrence Malick figure before Terrence Malick. Like the reclusive filmmaker, Pynchon likes to stay off the…
“The Infatuations” is a novel about death: literal death, literary death, the enduring power of the dead, and the inconvenience of their…
In praise of James Joyce’s “Dubliners”, Ezra Pound wrote, “since de Maupassant we have had so many people trying to write ‘stories’…