December 8, 2025 – “On the historic day when he finally reaches Lhasa, his journal entry begins: 'Our first care was to ...

Monsieur Baba appeared out of a dusty white Toyota, which he was maneuvering with one hand. He was dressed in used dusty blue ...

New books by Joe Brainard, Peter Handke, Tarpley Hitt, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, Christian Schlegel, and Olga Tokarczuk.

Happy endings are just about a question of the place where you choose to stop the story. In a life, there’s lots of moments ...

Never in my life have I managed to be unhappy when there was a pool around. I’m a Scorpio, a water sign. It’s a miracle I’ve ...

The fairy tales of Mary-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, Baronesse d’Aulnoy—first published in French in the 1690s—are full of jewel-like foods, poisoned drinks, and violent feats of baking. The ...

La Chanson de Roland is one of the major epic poems of the Middle Ages. It centers around one of Charlemagne’s adjutants, a prefect named Roland. Though billed as a “song,” it is a blood-soaked screed ...

From The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong, a new book by David Orr. A young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in ...

I don’t find myself investing much in the kingdom of heaven. It has always been this way for me, even as a child. I prayed often, sometimes the requisite five times a day in my Muslim household. But I ...

In 1910, a mouse named Ignatz first beaned Krazy Kat with a brick. The plot of this comic strip, centered on a “heppy go lucky kat,” is simple. Krazy Kat loves Ignatz Mouse. Officer Pup loves Krazy ...

“The laws of gravity can be figured out much more easily with intuition than anything else. It's a way of having experience without having to struggle through it.” I saw Margarito Duarte, after twenty ...

The old people are going apeshit for the mariachis. My dad and I are sitting on a bench in the plaza at the bottom of the hill, killing time before the next play. We were hoping to do a little reading ...