Someone really should write a compelling history of the diary. Those books we often associate with childhood have been, after all, vehicles for some of the most illuminating accounts of history: Samuel Pepys had his famed journals of seventeenth-century life, John de Crèvecoeur his observations of
It begins on a moonlit night. A carriage traverses the cold German countryside. The lights of a nearby (or is it far-off?) city shimmer and shift. A turn is taken and suddenly a traveler finds himself before the city's walls, and then within them. Uncertain figures move through the mist. The carriage
This July will mark the 120th anniversary of the birth of Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish intellectual who committed suicide in 1940. Since the publication of his collected writings fifteen years after his death, Benjamin's enigmatic essays like "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Amara Lakhous's novels portray the subtleties of immigrant lives—particularly those of Africans who have reached contemporary Rome. He is a novelist of culture clash, and his latest, Divorce Islamic Style, follows a Muslim woman whose marriage is in jeopardy, a fact that she regards with a combination of anticipation and dread.
Life is a little tricky for the inhabitants of Amelia Gray's stories. They might fall in love with a bit of frozen tilapia or find themselves policed by javelinas. There are multiplying vultures to contend with and hair that must be eaten, and the problem of trying to find a girlfriend in the
Robert Hughes brings an impressive erudition to bear upon his biography of Rome, tracing the city's rise from a patchwork foundation of local tribes to the site of La Dolce Vita. Sprawling subjects are Hughes's specialty: His reputation as a prominent art and cultural critic rests on a series of
One of the most exhausting aspects of life in the age of digital immediacy—a time when popularity is measured in Facebook "likes" and when important news stories trend on Twitter before being recognized by the media—is constantly having to hear about life in the age of digital immediacy. It seems
Nietzsche reminds us that philosophers have always taken great pains to hide themselves, whether behind the mask of Socrates or the mask of the categorical imperative. It is as if they believe anonymity will help them persuade readers that the systems they create are disinterested, objective, and
How to portray the state referred to as mental illness? Who tells the story and with what language? Dr. Jung famously told his patient James Joyce that the difference between him and his schizophrenic daughter Lucia was one of control. "You are like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling the other diving," Jung claimed. But what does that mean?
The Recognitions, William Gaddis's first novel, spent the two decades after its 1955 publication as an often out-of-print cult novel, read and discussed by a cadre of devotees who, as William Gass writes in his introduction to the 1993 Penguin Classics edition, "would keep its existence known until
