It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the ...

The only letter I’ve ever sent to the New York Times was in the 1980s, objecting to the paper’s suddenly pestilent use of “draconian.” During Iran–Contra the complaint must have seemed trivial; the ...

Earl Shorris’s book about the Clemente Course in the Humanities, The Art of Freedom: Teaching the Humanities to the Poor, will be published in 2013 by W. W. Norton. He was awarded a National ...

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From The Fry, which will be published in April by Winter Editions.

Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio from The Silence by Don DeLillo, read by Laurie Anderson, Jeremy Bobb, Marin Ireland, Robin Miles, Jay O. Sanders and ...

From the encrypted diaries of William Thomas Prestwood, a man who lived in Appalachia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many of the decryptions are collected in Cipher: Decoding ...

Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, by Northrop Frye. Princeton University Press. 408 pages. $22.95. The New Science, by Giambattista Vico. Translated from the Italian by Jason Taylor and Robert C.

Writing about “Woke” has at least two pitfalls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is ...

The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies, by Paul Fischer. Simon and Schuster. 416 pages. $28.99. On the morning of October 14, 1888, Louis Le Prince set ...

is a writer and bell ringer who lives in England.