A laurel. A reed. An echo. I wanted a poem that would turn like that, with snares and cinches, that would elapse very fast. I wanted the poem to drain through your fingers like sand.” ...

Ymei Subject: ….swiss self-end-of-life… To: Karen Shepard. how much advance notice does one need for a date.. ? are there any particular r ...

Here are stories we fought over, stories we couldn’t shake, stories that have a way of taking things we’re supposed to love—innocence, books, solidarity—and toying with them disconcertingly.” ...

the sun was shining on the veranda while tree sap slumbered, iridescent, in the courtyard, a single persimmon stood, while flies buzzed over loquat-colored soil ...

The artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith was born in 1967 in Riverside, California, and lives and works in Los Angeles. In gouache on black construction paper, this portfolio renders a selection of the ...

“They don’t exist anymore,” Sun Dongming said. “No.” Lin Wang shook his head. “When did they disappear?” “Let me ask.” Lin Wang dug around in his pocket for his phone. Sun Dongming thought he was ...

New books by Tim Altenhof, Louise Erdrich, Andrew Martin, Daniel Okrent, Rosemary Tonks, and Antoine Volodine.

Over a period of several years in the early seventeenth century, there appeared in Western Europe three manifestos laying out the history of the theretofore unheard-of Rosicrucian order, whose secret ...

Just as the sun begins to peek over the flat horizon of Coon Rapids, Iowa, 1,383 pigeons fill the sky. The birds pour out as a single winged mass from the rows of flung-open coops on the transport ...

My new job came with a research stipend. I’d never had one before—a few grand that would renew each year for five years and then end. What could I use it for? “Anything,” I was told, which seemed ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...

The mind is always too simply seeking meaning, trying to boil some beautiful thing down to its conceptual essence. What can stun the mind into quietness? What can briefly flummox the mind in its quest ...