It seems to me that I have wanted to write for the whole of my life. The intensity of this insistence, despite its implausibility, suggests an emotional, rather than literal, accuracy. I think my life didn’t seem my...
The Delaunay, an upscale brasserie in London, sits on a crescent-shaped road called Aldwych, where the West End meets Fleet Street, the city’s historic home for newspapers. Situated at the intersection of entertainment and news, it is the...
There was more flaying than I expected, though not necessarily more than I wanted, at “Mandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet.” Any visitors going to the Met’s exhibition in search of tranquillity will find a fifteenth-century flaying...
Whenever I hear the Arabic word mukhayyam, or camp, my mind leaps to Jabalia refugee camp, in northern Gaza. I was born in Al-Shati refugee camp, a few miles away, but Jabalia was where my maternal grandparents were...
You have something important to do—something vital. It’s not an item on a list but a burdensome project, urgent and complicated. Your home office must be transformed into a nursery for a baby due next month. Your late...
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” was an immediate best-seller when it was published, in 1943, and proved particularly popular with servicemen. Many readers addressed their fan letters not to the author, Betty Smith, but to her main character,...
The text that weighed on him at the time of his arrival to Turkey was his novel “Another Country,” then unfinished. The turbulence of civil-rights America, too. Baldwin is said to have come to the residence of Engin...
If your New Year’s resolution is to stop obsessively reading post-election analyses, then perhaps you would welcome another way of understanding these United States. What do Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia have in...
In the early months of 1973, the band that dared to call itself Big Star was anything but. The album of glittering, tightly orchestrated guitar rock they had released the previous year—titled “#1 Record,” both as a gag...
Robert Eggers’s remake of the German director F. W. Murnau’s 1922 vampire classic, “Nosferatu,” may be presumptuous, but it’s not cynical. Murnau’s film, a silent, is an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”—an unauthorized one, which led to a...
