With more than 500 interviews and over twenty years of research, Sam Stephenson presents his newest masterpiece Gene Smith’s Sink—an extraordinary look into the life of W. Eugene Smith, a revolutionary photojournalist who both captured some of history’s most powerful images and chronicled...

The questions of where a story should go can be paralyzing, especially in the beginning, when anything is possible, and especially if you’re not the type of writer to make a plan, which I’m not. To get through this hairy time, I’m likely to...

Fiction almost always gets Artificial Intelligence wrong. The AI narratives are generally Frankenstein (“It’s gone rogue!” e.g. Skynet) or Pinocchio (“I just want to be a real boy!” e.g. Commander Data), both of which are a little banal, and neither of which have much...

Colin Harrison and I are an unusual team: he has edited me, and I have the joy of editing him. He went first. In 2003, he edited a book I co-wrote with Mariane Pearl called A Mighty Heart, an account of the murder...

Jeff VanderMeer's Borne is an unusual kind of coming-of-age story—it isn't a human that grows up, but rather a sentient, shape-shifting bit of biotech, raised by a young woman in a city ravaged by corporate greed. The book was met with rave...

A few months ago I traveled to India for work. I went north and south, seeing auto rickshaws and UNESCO architecture. One of the best things I saw was a logo. The logo stands for the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, Gujarat....

Who’s a good dog? We humans seem to think highly of dogs who understand and care about what we want from them, says author Kirsten Bakis—but why don’t we measure ourselves by how well we can understand what they want from us? The mysterious...

Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of the Southern Reach Trilogy, explores northern Florida to discuss the encroaching threats to local wildlife, writing about the environment as a political act, and the inspiration for his latest novel, Borne.

My first experience with Robert Lowell’s poetry was a failure in reading comprehension. Breezing through a stack of poems I’d been assigned for a college class, I came to his “Man and Wife” and gave it my cursory attention. Its setup is not hard...

Though it charts historical and intellectual trends that have taken place over centuries, Pankaj Mishra's Age of Anger could hardly be more timely. Earlier this spring, Mishra and the author and artist Molly Crabapple corresponded over e-mail about the book and considered...

So Where Are We? So where were we? The fiery avalanche headed right at us—falling, flailing bodies in midair— the neighborhood under thick gray powder— on every screen. I don’t know where you are, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I heard a man say; the man who had spoken...

ENGLISH 206 Why would anyone even want to do it anymore? Fifty-two years ago I didn’t know what it was, And yet I knew I wanted to do it too, like the idea of a mind The self aspires to, the self a mind endeavors to become. I...

Daphne Merkin’s daring memoir about her lifelong struggle with depression received a fantastic review from Andrew Solomon on the front page of the February 5th, 2017 issue of The New York Times Book Review, which was especially gratifying since This Close to...

A locked-room mystery taking place at a rest home for burned-out futurists, Warren Ellis's Normal explores what happens when you spend all your time staring at the end of the world. A darkly funny book, Normal was initially published during the lead-up to...

Shortly before midnight on February 27, 2015, as Boris Nemtsov and his girlfriend were crossing the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in the shadow of the Kremlin, a man stepped out of the darkness and shot the prominent opposition politician four times, killing him instantly. Nemtsov...

On an unseasonably warm Saturday morning in early October, Jonathan Safran Foer sat down with New Yorker editor David Remnick for a conversation and reading from Here I Am as part of the 2016 New Yorker Festival. Despite taking place...

Like most books, my history of tap dancing does not include any video. But YouTube abounds in tap footage, easily accessible though impermanent, coming and going as copyright restrictions are irregularly enforced. By directing attention to it, I may cause it to disappear. Nevertheless,...

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...

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...

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...