Becky Zhang: “The Precipice” is set at a private all-girls school in Los Angeles in the Nineties, but is written from the ...

I’m talking about the rupture of a civilizing thread—historic events, like the start of the Civil War at Fort Sumter on April ...

Sherrill: You’ve lived in New York City for a number of years, as you note in the piece. It’s an old city, certainly, but doesn’t have nearly the “temporal depth” of London. Is there also a ...

In September 2023, in the middle of the night, England’s most beloved tree was mysteriously felled in a bizarre act of vandalism. The public outcry was swift and furious—this was, after all, by some ...

I met Richard E. Maltby Jr. while working as a Harper’s intern in the spring of 2022. An Englishman in New York, my colleagues were bemused by my lunchtime lucky dip: selecting a cryptic crossword at ...

is a writer and bell ringer who lives in England.

From the book When We Cease to Understand the World. The book, a fictionalized retelling of a series of scientific and mathematical discoveries, was published last month by New York Review Books.

In her many celebrated novels and story collections, Joy Williams tends to confront—with mordant comedy and bluntness and often a kind of ambiguously mystical quality (befitting the child of a ...

Of all the niche communities birthed by the modern internet, “gooners” might be the most alien, and to many, the most repellent. Gooning, writes Daniel Kolitz in the November issue, is “a new kind of ...

The word “relevant,” I was recently surprised to discover, shares an etymology with the word “relieve.” This seems obvious enough once you know it—only a few letters separate the words—but their ...

Franz Kafka was a skinny fellow; he claimed he was the thinnest person he knew. As a young man, he deliberately developed a facial tic. He sometimes felt he didn’t really exist, or if he did, only in ...