Collected Works, by Charles Portis. Library of America. 1,105 pages. $45. Not long before Charles Portis visited Buckingham Palace in the summer of 1964, having secured a rare invitation to “Her ...

A nton Chekhov once observed that the worst thing life can do to human beings is to inflict humiliation. Nothing, nothing, nothing in the world can destroy the soul as much as outright humiliation.

A t the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not unusual to enter common spaces across the United States—grocery stores, malls, office buildings—and experience a kind of perceptual whiplash. People ...

Age of Cage: Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career, by Keith Phipps. Henry Holt. 288 pages. $27.99. Last fall, hoping to draw weary crowds back to the multiplex, AMC Theatres enlisted ...

T he word “relevant,” I was recently surprised to discover, shares an etymology with the word “relieve.” This seems obvious enough once you know it—only a few letters separate the words—but their ...

The last time I ate real food, actually chewed and swallowed, was six years ago. During those final meals, I ordered a pastrami sandwich, a pork-belly bun, and vegetable soup. The sandwich needed more ...

Scenes from the Palestinian uprisingGet Access to Print and Digital for $23.99 per year. Subscribe for Full Access ...

Discussed in this essay: Warhol, by Blake Gopnik. Ecco. 976 pages. $45. One thing I miss is the time when America had big dreams about the future. Now it seems like nobody has big hopes for the future ...

Ninety minutes west of Boston, up the road from a Benedictine monastery, lies what is perhaps the most studied forest on Earth. Since 1907, when the first of these 3,850 acres of black oak and red ...

I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon. A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended ...

The story begins, as so many do, with a journey. In this case, it’s a seemingly simple one: a young girl, cloaked in red, must carry a basket of food through the woods to her bedridden grandmother.

On Annie Ernaux’s spectacular impersonalityDiscussed in this essay: A Girl’s Story, by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer. Seven Stories Press. 160 pages. $18.95. A Man’s Place, by Annie ...