Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen. Liveright. 576 pages. $40. In the 1630s, the powerful Pequot Confederacy of southern New England found itself beset by ...

F lash forward to the present day, as the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, “content.” As recently as fifteen years ago ...

What a sensible idea of Ashbery’s, I thought, and modest—to direct attention away from himself. It also worked to his own benefit; he was more interested in exploring these other poets and ...

Worms love southwestern Ontario. The region’s dairy farms offer loamy soil, untilled and laden with manure: an annelid’s arcadia. On damp nights, when the wind dies down and the temperature is just so ...

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, ...

Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, by Karl Marx. Edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press. 944 pages. $39.95. Our doomed thought ...

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 ...

From an introduction to the audiobook edition of J. F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, which was released in May by Hachette Audio. T oward the end of the nineteenth century, the ...

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 ...

From the introduction to a reissue of Martin Amis’s novel London Fields, which was published in November by Vintage, in Britain. The curse of Englishness is something whose magnitude we are still ...

How to explain to her daughter. Back when she was in college, she had taken a literary seminar for which she’d had to read Kafka’s “Letter to His Father.” After the class had discussed it, the teacher ...