From Pigeons on the Grass, a novel, which was published last month by New Directions. Koeppen (1906–96) was a German novelist who was awarded the Büchner Prize in 1962. Translated… ...

The radical is so often imagined as the marginal that sometimes the truly subversive escapes detection just by showing up in a tuxedo instead of a T-shirt or a ski… ...

From a certain angle, Donald Trump’s presidency may not have moved the United States in entirely the wrong direction. One of the few areas to benefit from his stewardship, the… ...

The fates of authors and publishers — not to mention the reading public — depend on book reviews — but who reviews the reviewers? Miss Hardwick undertakes one of the few thorough critiques of the ...

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 ...

From Speaking in Tongues, by J. M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos, which will be published this month by Liveright. j. m. coetzee: I was writing something yesterday, concentrating intensely on getting ...

The corpse flower, when it opens every few years, attracts admirers by the tens of thousands. It is only in bloom for two or three days, and for those days it stinks. People stand in line to savor its ...

It’s like this, says Lili. I left and I came back. I went and I returned. I tried. But I’m not made for success. Others might have succeeded. Not me. I’m not made for glory. I’m made for defeat. I’ll ...

From What Is Wrong with Men, a study of how portrayals of the American man have changed in films starring Michael Douglas, which will be published next month by Pantheon.

From The Essential C. D. Wright, which will be published this month by Copper Canyon Press.

We’d been in Maine six months, but for the first three our kids had continued to Zoom with their Brooklyn school and then summer had come. And then it was the third week of September, and I was still ...

Airless Spaces, by Shulamith Firestone. Semiotext(e). 232 pages. $17.95. Legends, fairy tales, and myths are rife with the constraints of prophecy: the necessity of surrender before the all-powerful ...