September 30, 2025 – "Reading apartment ads is like trying to understand a list of ingredients on the back of a can written ...

Yan Lianke’s story “ Plants, Stones, Dirt, and Sky ,” translated by Jeremy Tiang, appears in the Fall 2025 issue of The Paris ...

From the political philosopher Rahel Jaeggi’s Progress and Regression, translated from the German by Robert Savage (Harvard ...

January 28, 2016 – Horace Walpole coined the word serendipity in a letter to another Horace—Mann—dated January 28, 1754. The occasion was pretty unremarkable—it was a happy ...

January 29, 2015 – W. H. Auden was a professor at the University of Michigan for the 1941–42 academic year. His course was called Fate and the Individual in European ...

Of teaching Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with ...

Italy is not always the salvation of English-speaking people—but it does often seem that way. In film, in literature, in food, it’s the place where you go to find yourself. The real you, the one whose ...

May 15, 2013 – Via the 92nd Street Y, the only known recorded performance of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, which Thomas premiered at the Y in 1953.

October 26, 2012 – “TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”Daniel Horowitz takes on Poe’s classic 1843 tale of ...

As a child growing up in Midtown Manhattan, I learned to speak apartment very early. When other parents might ask, “What do your friend’s parents do?” my parents asked, “Where do they live?”—not ...

In 1910, a mouse named Ignatz first beaned Krazy Kat with a brick. The plot of this comic strip, centered on a “heppy go lucky kat,” is simple. Krazy Kat loves Ignatz Mouse. Officer Pup loves Krazy ...