It’s a good time to investigate the paradoxes and special strangeness of Andy Kaufman and Paul Reubens, oddly alike in some ...

Casting Miss World 1994 as the second-prettiest sister would make the metaphysics of their romance totally unrecognizable ...

Emma has been called a detective novel, and with good reason: the fun of first reading it consists largely in scrutinizing ...

But Goshen was not an attempt at charity. It was, according to my parents’ interpretation of scripture, a tangible ...

The cartoon character Mafalda, with her massive round head, sixties bob, triangular dress, and black Mary Janes, appears innocent. But this inquisitive girl-against-the-world is no ingenue—Mafalda ...

In December 1903, Thomas Mann wrote his older brother, Heinrich, a long letter reviewing the latter’s novel—with brutal candor. Some of the most scathing bits are below. The complete missive is in The ...

“A book is finished and appears and I feel, Well, next time I will unveil myself. And when the next book appears, I have the same feeling. And then your life ends, and that's it.” ...

Agosto Machado’s apartment and studio on East Third Street is crammed, floor to ceiling, with steel bookcases bursting with ...

An encounter with Emerson’s essays. This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as ...

I am greeted by the same sight that greeted tens of thousands of young women before me, the same sight that greeted a younger self when my cab from JFK pulled up a decade ago, that greeted the ...

Some people live more history than others: born in Heidelberg in 1895, the German literary giant Ernst Jünger survived a stint in the French Foreign Legion, the rise of the Third Reich, two world wars ...

On a stretch of rural road not far from my house, there is a small wood where, once a year, for just a few short and cold days, the ground turns a magnificent shade of purple. In a reversal of ...