Reading
Story Stream
The Invention of Close Reading May 13, 2025
I was an English major in college, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t understand why I should pay to study literature when I knew how to read and could do so more happily on my own time. Like many others, I majored in English for the creative-writing wor...
The Hobo Handbook May 13, 2025
The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, intended to keep the wrong people—cops, journalists, nos...
The Horror of Unlimited Freedom May 13, 2025
A Thessalian warlock meets the ghost of dead Julius Caesar alone in the pathless waste. A cloud of flying ants swarm an emperor and drag him down to hell. The doors of the mausoleum of Augustus bolt open of their own accord and summon Nero. Caligula ...
Kill the Editor May 13, 2025
Twelve years ago, editors at The Paris Review held an open Q&A session on Reddit. One user asked how many unsolicited submissions the magazine receives on average in a period. The editors said around 15,000 a year. In response to a related question, ...
On 'The Harmattan Winds' May 12, 2025
“We played the fool talking with long-legged words so as to mock the bastards who feed off human sorrow.” This is the mantra of Hugues and Habéké, the child heroes of Sylvain Trudel’s The Harmattan Winds, translated into English by Donald Winkler. Tr...
If You Write For Real, Chat GPT Cannot Replace You May 12, 2025
It’s rare when an article goes viral these days, so James D. Walsh’s “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College” post must have really tapped into something. To be a bit more specific, the article tapped into multiple things, as tends to happen ...
Read Maxim Gorky May 12, 2025
At seventy-two, Tolstoy was the most famous writer in Russia, well into the beatific, heretical Christianity he had discovered during his spiritual crisis two decades earlier.Maxim Gorky was much younger, the next big thing, risen to fame as a rakish...
A Book Catholic Evangelizers Need to Read May 12, 2025
A wide variety of evangelizing efforts have set out to make the church more relevant to young people. A new book by the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi is essential reading for those engaged in these ministries....
Andy Puzder's 'A Tyranny for the Good of Its Victims' May 12, 2025
How often do you get to read a book that’s impacting society as you’re reading it? Of the hundreds of titles that have changed the world we inhabit, perhaps only a dozen or so have accomplished this feat in real time. They include, probably, To Kil...
What to Do About the Decline of the Humanities May 12, 2025
Let’s assume it’s all over. I don’t believe that the humanities are dead, but let’s believe the hype. Let’s believe that college graduates using ChatGPT are going to be illiterate (how they can use ChatGPT if they are literally illiterate I do not kn...
Criticism and Free Expression in the University May 12, 2025
What follows is a selection from the audience Q&A of the panel “Can Criticism Survive Inside the University?”—the first panel of our conference “The End of the University and the Future of Criticism,” which took place April 3rd. You can read the open...
An Interview With Ross Barkan May 09, 2025
I met Ross Barkan in the summer of 2024, when he quite unexpectedly came to my talk at the World Transsexual Forum. He had read my novel, The Default World, and he was a fan, conducting an interview with me for his newsletter, Political Currents by R...
A Mobster’s Mensch May 09, 2025
James Gandolfini would have been the first person to wonder why anyone would read a book about him, judging from a new biography, Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend. This was a performer whose sense of self-worth, depending on the day, r...
Models, Reality TV, and Stick-Shift Surprises May 07, 2025
I’ve just finished reading a review copy of a terrific forthcoming book: You Wanna Be on Top?: A Memoir of Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America’s Next Top Model by Sarah Hartshorne. Hartshorne was a contestant on America’s Next Top Model...
Trying to Find Small Press Books May 07, 2025
In December, we wrote an essay about how small presses still fight the good fight for risky literary fiction, even as the conglomerated Big Five publishers abandon it. In a time when companies like Meta steal books to build generative AI, then claim ...
Close Reading Shakespeare: Othello Speaks May 06, 2025
Othello, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 1-27By the mid-1970s, the job market for PhD’s in English was bleak, so I was lucky to receive an offer from Wellesley College. I had solid credentials and strong recommendations, but so did countless others who applied...
My Brain Finally Broke May 06, 2025
I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor. I sometimes look up words after I write them: does “illegib...
Rumble in Hyannis: The Kennedy Feud Gets Serious May 06, 2025
In late January, fresh off her two-year tenure as Joe Biden’s ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy did something decidedly undiplomatic. Back at her apartment on Park Avenue, Kennedy, the only surviving child of the slain 35th president of the U...
The Social Stock Market May 05, 2025
There’s a paragraph in Norman Podhoretz’s Making It, his polarizing if riveting account of a life in letters in midcentury America, that’s always stuck with me. “Every morning,” he wrote in the 1967 memoir, “a stock-market report on reputation comes ...
A Fifth of American Adults Can’t Read May 05, 2025
Marian* was in her late 30s when we first met, and she asked me to help her learn to read. This was in 2007. I was the new-ish supervisor of a tutoring program in Manhattan aimed at adults who were trying to get their GED. Most students came in for h...
8 New Books You Should Read This May May 02, 2025
Every month, Emma Alpern and Jasmine Vojdani will make new fiction and nonfiction book recommendations. This is their first batch of titles — you should read as many of them as possible. Make sure to also have on your radar Little Bosses Everywhere: ...
Y2K and the Millennial Virgil May 01, 2025
An epigraph (literally, a “writing upon”) is a brief inscription at the beginning of a literary work, meant to suggest the book’s theme or convey its tone. Surprisingly, an epigram is almost a literary genre in itself, a fact you can verify quickly b...
'White Lotus' and the Pain of Desire April 09, 2025
This weekend, HBO aired the finale third season of White Lotus. From what I’ve read, it’s one that that left many disappointed. What happened to skewering the rich? Why’d we spend six episodes essentially just watching Timothy Ratliff eating lorazepa...
Paul Ricoeur and the Crisis of Atheism April 09, 2025
Twentieth-century French philosophy continues to inflame the passions of American readers in the 21st. While Anglo-American philosophy can seem impossibly dry and technical, the great French masters still speak to our most urgent concerns. What they ...
The Literary Man Isn’t Dead April 09, 2025
“The decline and fall of literary men should worry everyone.” That’s how The New York Times framed the glaring absence of men from modern literary culture, warning that young men will soon be lost to the misogynistic vortex of the “manosphere”....
