“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody,” Rilke wrote in his response to a request for advice and feedback from the nineteen-year-old aspiring poet Franz Kappus. “I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps.” Rilke’s...

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody,” Rilke wrote in his response to a request for advice and feedback from the nineteen-year-old aspiring poet Franz Kappus. “I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps.” Rilke’s...

Geoff Manaugh’s A Burglar’s Guide to the City (FSG Originals) is a nonfiction look at more than two thousand years of heists, break-ins, and escapes. His book approaches the city the way a burglar would, with an eye for vulnerabilities and blind...

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody,” Rilke wrote in his response to a request for advice and feedback from the nineteen-year-old aspiring poet Franz Kappus. “I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps.” Rilke’s...

Who could resist this invitation to eavesdrop on the fabulous? The title for Ange Mlinko’s most recent book, Marvelous Things Overheard, is taken from a collection of anecdotes and wonders, falsely attributed to Aristotle, which explain, in tight descriptive units, marvels of the...

Like Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Christopher Logue’s “account” of the Iliad is an imagist epic. It is surely less various and original than its modernist precursors, but it can’t be matched for sheer pleasure. With plot and character given, Logue attends to local intensities and...

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody,” Rilke wrote in his response to a request for advice and feedback from the nineteen-year-old aspiring poet Franz Kappus. “I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps.” Rilke’s...

A few weeks ago, when I was in London to present my book about Moscow, I was asked—like many a debut author—how much of the story was based on my own experience. This was just after my first public reading—I was still shaken—and...

When you write a novel, people want to know if the events are true. Did this really happen? No, I say. That’s what makes it a novel. But some of the things in Hurt People did happen to me. That too is...

“Why did you write this book the way you did?” the interviewer asks. The query is delivered in the kindly, hushed tone that one might use with a schoolboy who has a “kick me” sign taped to his back.

I’d been researching a biography of the late art dealer Richard Bellamy (1927–1998) for several years when he popped up in a dream. In waking hours, I tracked the man whom everybody called Dick through the postwar art world, perplexed by his absence from...

Biography is autobiography, as every biographer knows. If a biographer cannot find himself in his subject, then the result is a compendium of names and dates, people met and places visited—useful information, perhaps, but the subject is just as dead at the end of...

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at," wrote Oscar Wilde in 1891. Yet for nearly two thousand years after Plato's Republic, most Western thinkers did ignore Wilde's map. Christianity, as interpreted by the Apostle Paul,...

As an undergraduate I became fixated on my tutor, Ann Wordsworth, a woman of devastating command who held the other English Literature dons in contempt. Tutorials were conducted in a grubby shed in the college grounds where we chain-smoked Gitanes and quaffed red wine...

“A Reply to Filmer” The binding was brittle and faded, but Carol could still make out the words. We’d spent the last three years scouring the library for rare volumes, but we’d missed this one, the rarest. Our...

I take it as a compliment when people say my writing about music makes them interested in hearing the work I have described. The comment may not always be intended as a compliment. It may well be meant to say that the words on...

In 2001 I was living in Charlottesville, reading poetry at the University of Virginia, a young Canadian who had never been in the southern states before. In my second week I bought a beautiful used set of Shelby Foote’s Civil War volumes. Six weeks...

Shirley Hazzard, who died on December 12 at the age of 85, wrote two collections of short stories, four novels, and three works of nonfiction. FSG published her last two works: in 2000, a memoir about Graham Greene, Greene on Capri, and, in...

It’s Emmanuel Carrère who stopped me from writing this article. Right at the moment when I’d planned to knuckle down and sort through the disparate ideas that had occurred to me during the four years I’d spent translating his works, Farrar, Straus and Giroux—which...

The circumstances of my own life have fueled my attraction to Leonardo Padura’s last two novels and led to my translation of them. When I first read The Man Who Loved Dogs—his sprawling novel about Trotsky’s years in exile, and the Soviet plot to...