Dreams are trash. Dreams are ash. A man from Los Angeles left a small ziplock bag of his ashes to me in his will.” ...

Vladimir Sorokin. Photograph by Maria Sorokina. My problems started much earlier than the night before deadline—they started ...

My mamaw used to say, ‘I thought life was just one damned thing after another until I realized it’s the same damned thing ...

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages.

My friend gave me the packet of letters to keep, and I knew that one day I would try to make something out of it.” ...

October 24, 2024 – “His true crime or true-enough crime trilogy is a masterpiece and deserves the Library of America today, agents and editors and rights issues be damned.” ...

André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t necessarily sit at a cleared table in the ...

Usually, institutional libraries are governed by highly codified policies. Their catalogues are their raison d’être, elegant data structures that facilitate easy circulation and millennial continuity.

An ice storm, following seven days of snow; the vast fields and drifts of snow turning to sheets of glazed ice that shine and shimmer blue in the moonlight as if the color is being fabricated not by ...

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 ...

In the Italy I first knew, the Italy of the midseventies, political debate seemed to constitute the molten core of every dramatic conversation. My Italian was good and improving, but it never really ...

October 16, 2023 – On finding a version of heaven—or, perhaps, life—in Red Dead Redemption 2.