Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald, by Carole Angier. Bloomsbury. 640 pages. $32. In mid-August of this year I traveled from Berlin to the small town of Sonthofen, in the Allgäu region of ...

Holidays, in themselves, are no longer interesting and I’ve no desire to hear any more about them. To quote Mrs. Quill, from Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies—there was famously only ever one novel and ...

Writing about “Woke” has at least two pitfalls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is ...

The bus bumps onto the dark highway. It is almost as cold inside as out, and the windows are already icing over from our breath. Our guide is Céline, a petite Frenchwoman. “We have clouds tonight,” ...

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, edited by Ralph Rugoff. Hatje Cantz. 208 pages. $48. The Artist’s Studio: A Century of the Artist’s Studio 1920–2020, edited by Iwona Blazwick. Whitechapel Gallery.

EXT. 8TH STREET—LATE AFTERNOON (C. 1959). CAMERA IN NONSTOP MOTION is on the shoulder of a young man, late teens, intently walking west on a busy Greenwich Village thoroughfare. Under one arm, he’s ...

I went to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005 because I’d won a writing prize, and with that prize came an invitation to a luncheon and awards ceremony. Each honoree was allowed to bring ...

I’m scrolling through terrible images on the internet the way James Baldwin describes browsing on a television some mornings before getting out of bed, switching from channel to channel restlessly, ...

We’d been in Maine six months, but for the first three our kids had continued to Zoom with their Brooklyn school and then summer had come. And then it was the third week of September, and I was still ...

I am sitting in a bland conference room in Midtown Manhattan with twenty-nine so-called business professionals, and one of our instructors, Sharon, has just told us to imagine a huge rectangular brass ...

“This time is different.” With Donald Trump’s second term off to a roaring, snorting start—a furious dust cloud of ICE raids and ICE-raid photo ops, tariffs announced and then paused, a funding freeze ...

A version of this column originally ran in Le Devoir on December 2, 2024. Translated from the French by Elettra Pauletto. It seems former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took Donald Trump ...