Which were the pivotal years of the past century? An argument could be made for 1929, when the worldwide financial crash ushered in the crisis that led to the rise of Nazism... Read more »
Defying the dire predictions that attended its birth as an independent nation-state in 1947, the Indian republic is more than seventy-five years old. And yet, it is a place where criticisms of... Read more »
Lauren Oyler is an American writer, very tall and very smart (or so I read). In 2021, she published her first novel, Fake Accounts, a plotless story about a young woman not... Read more »
Cities in the global north that curb their carbon emissions are doing more to address colonial injustices than those who focus their efforts on taking down statues and changing street names, one... Read more »
In Charlie Kaufman’s puppet animation Anomalisa, everyone looks and speaks the same. It’s as though a scene in an earlier Kaufman-penned film, Being John Malkovich, in which Malkovich surveys a restaurant from... Read more »
A rare watercolour depicting the aftermath of a climactic moment in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is to go on display at the author’s country home after conservation work. The painting, The... Read more »
In 2021, Jack Chadwick, a twenty-seven-year-old barman and part-time go-go dancer, was browsing the shelves of the Working Class Movement Library, outside Manchester, when he spied an arresting book cover. The hand-drawn... Read more »
In July, 2013, Will Shortz, the New York Times’ longtime puzzle editor, asked me to be his assistant. I had just graduated from college, and, to my mind, the invitation had little... Read more »
Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov, 56, won last year’s International Booker prize (with translator Angela Rodel) for his dystopian comedy Time Shelter, about an innovative dementia clinic that restages the past. His previous... Read more »