Elif Batuman's new novel The Idiot, published by Penguin Press, has been lauded as "a hefty, gorgeous, digressive slab of a book." It tells the story of Selin, the introverted, tall daughter of Turkish immigrants in her first year at Harvard. The...

On March 26, “Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture,” a traveling exhibition of the great architect’s papers, sketches, and models, arrives at one of his most celebrated buildings, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Wendy Lesser, author of the new Kahn biography,...

I was planning a novel that involved a breakout from a Chinese labor camp and had just reread The Count of Monte Cristo, looking for ideas. At Hong Kong’s Central Library, I typed the word laogai, “labor reform,” into the computer catalog. Among the...

Two Meetings and a Departure On a spring morning in 2009, Matthew Lawrence dropped the anchor of his small boat at a random spot in the middle of a blue ocean bay on the east coast of Australia, and jumped over the side. He swam...

William came up out of the mortuary feeling blown out, depressed. He could not say if Charlotte Reckitt had deserved her end and he told himself he did not care but it was not true. He thought of her ravaged scalp and the tufts...

Máni Steinn, a young queer boy living in Reykjavík in 1918, is fascinated by the cinema. His queerness, and his city, put him on the fringes of a society that is itself at the fringes of the world—at what seems like history's most tumultuous,...

Terry Tempest Williams's new book, The Hour of Land, takes her across the country to national parks. Through a variety of forms, she explores the relationship between people and their parks, and complicates the parks' status as "America's best idea." In the following...

Ruth woke at four in the morning and her blurry brain said “Tiger.” That was natural; she was dreaming. But there were noises in the house, and as she woke she heard them. They came across the hallway from the lounge room. Something large...