I’m scrolling through terrible images on the internet the way James Baldwin describes browsing on a television some mornings before getting out of bed, switching from channel to channel restlessly, ...

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

From an introduction to the audiobook edition of J. F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, which was released in May by Hachette Audio. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the ...

Alice James: A Biography, by Jean Strouse. Picador. 416 pages. $20. Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, by Jean Strouse. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 336 pages. $32. In 2001, the ...

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I led a virtual discussion of War and Peace, with the thought that someone else might enjoy reading the novel with me. Three thousand people ended up ...

I’ve never wanted to be pregnant, and I’ve been pregnant three times. Each time I learned the news, my commitment to what I’d already known was confirmed viscerally and instantaneously—with the ...

Elden Ring, developed by FromSoftware. Bandai Namco. $59.99. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, developed by FromSoftware. Bandai Namco. $39.99. Video games, even when played alone, have to be ...

For one thing, I hate stillness. On the front porch, waiting, I see an animal I don’t recognize: feet of a bird, wings of a leaf. The grotesqueness of attachment, the loudness of the woods, I knew it ...

The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45. This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I ...

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in ...

A late summer sun burned out in the west behind me, blood rays filtering through the Texas sky. Crimson clouds turned gold as I stopped at a gas station in Granite, Oklahoma. At a crossroads a few ...