"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,...
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...
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...
Ian Frazier's been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1974 and has published more than a dozen books with FSG. In his latest collection, Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces, his own curiosity becomes the impetus for the writing that The New...
C. E. Morgan's "tremendous" new novel, The Sport of Kings, is a multi-generational saga set on the bluegrass fields and racing tracks of Kentucky. This June, Morgan, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 recipient, sat down with Lisa Lucas, the Executive...
Adam Phillips has been called “the Oliver Sacks of psychoanalysis,” and in his remarkable new book, Unforbidden Pleasures, he writes about agency and desire in an utterly transformative way. Here, Phillips discusses the tyranny of the Oedipus complex, Oscar Wilde, procrastination, and...
My first kiss was a wash. I must have been four years old, because my sister was a baby. My best friend Alexander and I took advantage of the distraction she was causing to sneak away from the movie that my mother had left...
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...
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...
“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...
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...
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...
In Cuba, poetry is in the air one breathes. It is in the music, in the humor, in the political debates, in the desire to be fully in the present and in the recognition that history is implacable. There is a poetry within, written...
“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...
“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...
There are many ways to write about Africa, but talent remains the compass. While the continent’s history cannot be easily summarized, its predicament is still one of domination, a taxing predicament that calls for sagacity as well as imagination. Writing under domination is not...
I think of poetry as what Wallace Stevens called a soliloquy of the interior paramour, or less grandly, as a form of talking to yourself, rather than addressing an audience. But I have the sense that when people first hear this description of poetry,...
Cote Smith’s debut, Hurt People—“A very special first novel . . . Writing with extraordinary grace and tenderness, Smith injects unnerving tension into a delicate coming-of-age story set squarely in the path of a tornado,” writes Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times...