Essays

No Haven

In ‘This Is All I Got,’ a report about a year in the life of a homeless single mother in New York City, Lauren Sandler finds the intractable source of homelessness in the piratical inequities of the housing market.

October 22, 2020 issue

The Writer–Translator Equation

I have been dividing my working day between writing in the morning and translating in the afternoon. Maybe comparing the two activities would be a good way to test the writer–translator equation.

September 21, 2020

Wendell Berry’s High Horse

October 8, 2020 issue

A Second Chance

A trial jury is like an audience at a play that wants to be entertained. Witnesses, like stage actors, have to play to that audience if their performances are to be convincing.

September 24, 2020 issue

Page-Turners

September 24, 2020 issue

‘Hansel and Gretel’ in LA County

The stories of children with open investigations by the Department of Children and Family Services remind me of fairy tales from another dark time.

August 27, 2020

My Friend John Lewis

When, in the summer of 1962, I first saw him sitting in the corner of a small church in Cairo, Illinois, I knew who he was. John Lewis was a Freedom Rider.

August 21, 2020

My Quarantine: One More Vibration

On March 6, 2020, one of the last days of what we might call normalcy, I bought a violin at a thrift store outside Boston.

August 15, 2020

Balthus’s Brilliant Brother

Seventy years after it was written, Pierre Klossowski’s first novel, The Suspended Vocation, has finally found its way into English, providing the occasion to reassess his subterranean, but nevertheless profound, influence on post-war fiction and philosophy.

August 8, 2020

The Fiction of Winners & Losers

Am I being reductive? All of narrative fiction, I’ve suggested, can be sorted into four grand categories.

July 28, 2020