Munch the twenty-one-year-old likely did not approach his painting with a theory about reality and our image of it, he ...

If you’re deprived of a home, deprived of access to your family, you learn that, actually, being bound to others is the ...

Our bathtub was born in a sturdier, more brutal age. It’s a deep and oblong cauldron—perfect for cooking a human being—which stands in the center of our kitchen. Perched between the cheapo stove and ...

Flannery O’Connor’s favorite meal at the Sanford House restaurant in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lunched regularly with her mother, was fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie. O ’ Connor, after ...

I am partial to sentences with this framework: “There are two kinds of [ ]: those who [ ], and those who [ ].” The setup should, ideally, involve a chiasmus or double entendre or any florid rhetorical ...

February 19, 2015 – André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t ...

Mary Stuart was six days old when she became the Queen of Scotland. Her precious body was guarded from that moment onward, moved like a pawn on a chessboard from one castle to another. Maybe the ...

Ernst Gombrich, likely the most influential art historian of the twentieth century, is ripe for revisiting. His outlook on what constituted important art was white, elite, male, and Eurocentric. In ...

Everybody in the New Wave–nostalgia hotel has their phones out, which makes me pretty much like everybody else. After breezing past the lobby desk, I peek around: slate colors, fresh leather. There ...

My water journey began on the airplane, when I recognized a bottle of Elisabethen Quelle. I remembered this brand from my time at the Doemens water sommelier school in Gräfelfing. It’s a mainstream ...

The difficulty of representing the past accurately—even if that past is itself a dream, a reconstruction of a reconstruction, a palimpsest of a palimpsest—is one known to people other than writers, of ...