Letters
Story Stream
No Ordinary Joe November 29, 2024
Joe Brainard had a reputation for being sweet. Contemporaries of the visual artist and poet often sidelined his accomplishments to speak or write about his interpersonal kindness. “Joe Brainard was one of the nicest artists I have ever known. Nice as...
The New Yorker’s Cavalcade of Ignorance November 27, 2024
How honest are we about our ignorance? How honest do we want to be? In answer to that eternal question, which is—or should be—of particular interest to reporters, the 20-page, 12-essay onslaught of postelection “dispatches” that dominates the latest ...
America’s Literacy Crisis Isn’t What You Think November 26, 2024
“Kids can’t read anymore.”We heard this refrain earlier this month, when some connected a decline in reading among young people, as well as a shift toward getting news and information from short-form video, with the recent presidential election victo...
The Cult of Haruki Murakami November 26, 2024
On March 20, 1995, members of a religious cult released toxic gas in three Tokyo subways, killing thirteen people. Some months later, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami happened to be reading the letters page of a banal Ladies’ Home Journal–type m...
The Ethics of Self-Interpretation November 21, 2024
The polemical intensity that made a set of radical ideas about race and gender seem, for a time, to be the new moral consensus of media, academia, and corporate management, is over—maybe. Kamala Harris’ losing presidential campaign was muted in its i...
Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence November 21, 2024
I’m about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history. And before you ransack the canon for a glamorous rebuttal, I must warn you: Its preeminence is conclusive. Dante and Beatrice, Scott and Zelda, Véra and Vladimir. All famous cases of ...
Reclaiming Ted Hughes November 19, 2024
Before preparing this essay, I began where many Americans seem hesitant to tread: with the poetry. I read and reread every poem I could find by Ted Hughes, as well as the slender oeuvre of Sylvia Plath, taking notes and contemplating both deeply. I r...
Hawthorne’s Mood Swings November 13, 2024
Returning to Hawthorne after many years and remembering, particularly in The Scarlet Letter and “Young Goodman Brown,” a general atmosphere of Puritan rigor versus demonic hedonism, one expects to find a man torn between vice and virtue....
The Sun Also Sets November 13, 2024
The Library of America is something of a publishing curiosity. Its declared aim is to preserve America’s literary heritage “by publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing.” Yet, unlike those...
"Didion and Babitz" by Lili Anolik November 11, 2024
Joan Didion is revealed at last in this outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work "that reads like a propulsive novel" (Oprah Daily) on the mutual attractions—and mutual antagonisms—of Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz.Co...
Let’s Get This Party Started November 05, 2024
The $30 ticket to Maria Bruggere’s election party in Los Angeles guarantees attendees an unlimited number of both “Pina Kamalas” and “Kamalaritas.” An open taco bar will be on-site, alongside photo booths, a dessert menu, and a merchandise shop brimm...
Found in Translation November 01, 2024
Last March, I was at my airport gate in San Diego when I noticed a man staring at an upside-down boarding pass. He smoothed it, then stood up, disoriented, paced around in brown work boots, and sat down again next to me, the letters still rotated the...
When Emily Dickinson Mailed It In August 23, 2024
On March 5, 1853, while her family ate breakfast, Emily Dickinson addressed four envelopes to Susan Gilbert, a woman with whom she seemed to be in love. The envelopes were empty. Though Emily had already written Sue several letters—and would, over th...
The Literati Aren’t Reading New Releases Anymore August 21, 2024
On a recent visit to New York, I did a reading, and a lot of the chatter was about how something seems to be wrong in the literary star-making machine. Publicists keep pulling the usual levers and nothing seems to be happening. Journals ignore their ...
Revisiting Larkin August 19, 2024
Dana Gioia’s new book of essays about poetry covers much interesting ground, from his Longinian essay about poetry as enchantment to his lively biographical pen-portrait of Donald Davie to several shorter pieces about particular poets, including Phil...
A Conversation with Naomi Kanakia August 19, 2024
I first discovered Naomi Kanakia, as I find most talented writers these days, on Substack. In her eclectic newsletter, Women of Letters, she can be found expounding on the history of Hinduism, the sociology of literature, Tolstoy, and whatever else m...
Matt Rife’s Sleepless Summer August 15, 2024
For an entertainer, a casino gig is a double-edged sword. It can be a lucrative booking, a sign that you’ve entered a rarefied tier of bankability. But casino crowds can be tough: they’re often filled with inebriated people who are frustrated from lo...
Five Letters from Seamus Heaney August 13, 2024
The following five letters were written by the poet Seamus Heaney, all in the spring of 1995. The Paris Review’s interview with Heaney, referenced in his letter to Henri Cole, is available here; two of his poems appeared in the magazine in 1979....
Infra-ordinary People August 09, 2024
Over three days in October 1974, the French experimental writer Georges Perec sat in cafés and a tabac in a Parisian public square called Place Saint-Sulpice and jotted down everything he saw. His observations became a book called An Attempt to Exhau...
Robbie Robertson’s Tailor August 09, 2024
According to my father, it was Harold “the Colonel” Kudlets, a talent broker in Hamilton, Ontario, who brought Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm up to Canada. Kudlets, a Glasgow-born Jew, knew Charlie Halbert, an agent down in Helena, Arkansas, w...
Attack of the Brat August 02, 2024
The word “BRAT” is ominously taped on author Jon-Jon Goulian’s front-hall wall in electric-blue gaffer’s tape. Nearby, “DON’T SELL THE HOUSE,” in bold, block letters, reads like a ransom note. Goulian, his head shaved and sinewy body well-tatted, has...
A Garden Full of Monsters August 02, 2024
The title of José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night comes from a letter Henry James Sr. wrote to his sons Henry and William:Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy ...
