What a sensible idea of Ashbery’s, I thought, and modest—to direct attention away from himself. It also worked to his own benefit; he was more interested in exploring these other poets and ...

Tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees settled in Toronto in the Eighties, and word spread among them that worm picking was a sure way to make money, albeit a punishing one. Pickers ruin their knees ...

W hen Frankenthaler was visiting Spain in 1953, her friend Sonya Rudikoff wrote to her and asked for her impressions of political life under Franco. She did not answer the question. “She had more ...

Discussed in this essay: Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, by Karl Marx. Edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press. 944 pages.

Cymbidium Lowianum, a color lithograph by Joseph Mansell, after a painting by Henry George Moon from Reichenbachia: Orchids Illustrated and Described, Second Series, Vol. 2, Tab 53, c. 1888–94, by ...

Future-proofing the American workerListen to an audio version of this article. I am sitting in a bland conference room in Midtown Manhattan with twenty-nine so-called business professionals, and one ...

Katie Kitamura’s anti-expressive fictionDiscussed in this essay: Audition, by Katie Kitamura. Riverhead Books. 208 pages. $28. O ne third of the way into Katie Kitamura’s 2017 novel, A Separation, its ...

“P aul says I’m just dicknotized.” Paul is Lily’s gay best friend and closest romantic confidant. Grating portmanteaus are a crucial part of their relationship. “Dickmatized?” I pronounce the word ...

From an introduction to the audiobook edition of J. F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, which was released in May by Hachette Audio. T oward the end of the nineteenth century, the ...

Discussed in this essay: Alice James: A Biography, by Jean Strouse. Picador. 416 pages. $20. Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, by Jean Strouse. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 336 ...

The Twisted City, an illustration by Timothy Kelly. The artwork depicts a character of Kelly’s invention, “The Weaver,” in the Northern Limit, an unfinished level discarded early in the development of ...

I n the mid-Nineties, I spent about eighteen months working as an editor for the British edition of a new magazine called Wired, which had been founded in San Francisco as a sort of house journal of ...