Borderline by Timothy Ely, front (left) and back (right) cover. Photographs by Max Ross. Late in the week I got an email from one of my book dealers. He was at a…
Hildegard, Tarkovsky, Citrus Trees
Photograph by Lazaregagnidze, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. I began growing kumquat trees after my German hairdresser—who fixes BMWs and fills his salon with large, flapping plants—pulled a pale…
Idiots: On Munch and von Trier
Edvard Munch, The Sick Child (1855–1886), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The Sick Child by Edvard Munch is undoubtedly a highlight of Norwegian painting, still compelling and touching, still unsurpassed. The odd…
Perfectoid Spaces
Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up…
Love in a Fallen City: Shanghai’s Marriage Market
The market, May 2015. Photograph by Reinhold Möller, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. On a low-pollution Sunday last December, the weekend before Christmas, I headed to People’s Park on Shanghai’s…
Building an AI Data Center in Pine Island, Minnesota
Pine Island, 2026. Photograph by Thomas John Weber. Pine Island, despite its name, is not an island. It’s your average Midwestern farm town, population 3,800. Highway 52 cuts through it like a…
Barthelme, the Houstonian
Donald Barthelme, via Wikimedia Commons. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. Public domain. Barthelme was a Houstonian. To me this is the single most salient fact about him, though the…
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s “Perte Loss”
From Perte Loss, 1979. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation. In 1979, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha submitted a proposal…
In “Mutual Analysis” with Wallace Shawn’s Moth Days
Wallace Shawn in The Fever. Photograph by Julieta Cervantes. At an open rehearsal last fall of Wallace Shawn’s new play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, the director, André Gregory, Shawn’s longtime collaborator…
The Literary Agent’s Invisible Hand: Laura B. McGrath on Middlemen
The literary agent is a mysterious and camera-shy creature, rustling busily in the literary undergrowth, her tracks visible only to those familiar with the species and its habits. If we were in…