Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...

I n the eighth grade I hit a kid named Kevin Flowers so hard in the face that he had to travel out of state to get a corrective rhinoplasty. He made a horrible joke. He hadn’t even been talking to me.

One night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact ...

A person once said to me, “You’re a writer. You must have a lot to say.” He was making an assumption. I’ve thought about his assumption many times. Is it that simple? Do I write because I have a lot ...

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 ...

From a speech given by the Tennessee state senator in April during a debate on a bill to make camping along highways a misdemeanor. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I haven’t given y’all a history lesson in a ...

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Our misunderstanding of relevance may come from a single word in the OED definition: “Appropriate or applicable in the (esp. current) context.”In the age of Twitter feeds and nonstop news, our ...

When the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and a mask. This was a ...

I recall having breakfast at a hotel in Brussels in 2017 and sitting across from Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the 1991 book that gave my generation a ...

A fter eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, Bergis Jules found himself worrying not only over the horrors of the present, but also over how ...

The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume I: 1927–1939, edited by Edward Mendelson. Princeton University Press. 848 pages. $58.70. The Complete Works of W. H ...