If there’s a trick to writing a libretto, it’s thinking first about what’s happening onstage and not about what characters are saying. With that in mind, I realized early on that since the novel is ...

Saint, terrorist, fishwife. Stench that appals. Famines, machine guns, the Great Plague (your sickness), Rending of garments, cries, mass burials. I'd watched my beard sprout in the mirror's grave.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Sharon Olds discusses sex, religion, and writing poems that “women were definitely not supposed to write,” in an excerpt from her Art of Poetry interview with Jessica ...

Have all been fought and won. In a very short time, now. This war will be done. So I order my men. Children, actually, and far from home. To fight and die for nothing. We don't want no more of your ...

While I write this, my husband is cycling through the rain, taking our one-year-old son, who last night yet again wouldn’t sleep, to nursery school, and I am thinking of Tove Ditlevsen’s poems. I, too ...

Plato’s Phaedrus begins at the edge of the city of Athens, in the countryside, as we would say today. Enter Socrates and Phaedrus, his younger friend. Phaedrus has just come from the house of Lysias, ...

It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym.

Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack ...

My very first memory takes place at the local Blockbuster store, where I went one night with my father to rent a movie. I was four or five years old. He let me run ahead of him through the aisles, and ...

For two weeks at the beginning of January in New York, a cluster of theater festivals—including Under the Radar, Prototype, the Exponential Festival, and PhysFestNYC—stage a confetti cannon’s worth of ...

Fredric Jameson, Hanif Kureishi, Gerald Murnane, Adania Shibli, Silas Jones, Simone White, Dan Bevacqua, Caoilinn Hughes, Rachel Mannheimer, Hua Xi, Ann Craven, ...