Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Writing about Plautus, the 200 BC Roman creator of the most extensive extant collection of early Latin comedies, the classicist Gilbert Norwood chalked up a good bit of the author’s subsequent renown to the fact that he was a rare comic bird in a culture that put its stock in the battlefield and the courtroom and in “giving off gravitas.” “People . . . beam delightedly whenever Plautus is mentioned, simply because, in an age otherwise unfamiliar to us, he writes of things familiar to us indeed. ‘Fancy a man in a

In the best chapter in Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks describes his own history of experimentation with drugs during his thirties, when he was a neurology resident in Southern California on a quest to satisfy an obsessive curiosity about the neurochemical background of dreams and hallucinations. A day on Artane, a synthetic drug allied to belladonna that in large doses can induce delirium, featured a visit from his friends Jim and Kathy. Sacks cooked ham and eggs, chatting with them as he stood in the kitchen and they sat in the living room, then put breakfast on a tray and carried it

“I was born with a white beauty mark, or what others call a birthmark, covering the cornea of my right eye,” an unnamed female narrator states at the outset of Guadalupe Nettel’s autobiographical novel, The Body Where I Was Born. The spot, she describes, “stretched across my iris and over the pupil through which light must pass to reach the back of the brain.” And so, “in the same way an unventilated tunnel slowly fills with mold, the pupillary blockage led to the growth of a cataract.”

“You are going to die and I am the one who is going to kill you. I promise you this.” Slate writer Amanda Hess received this tweet from the charmingly named user “headlessfemalepig.” She wrote about the experience—and, more generally, about the hazards of being a woman online—for Pacific Standard in early 2014. In that article, for which she later won a National Magazine Award, she details some of the exhausting consequences of online harassment: “Threats of rape, death, and stalking can overpower our emotional bandwidth, take up our time, and cost us money through legal fees, online protection services,

“Already,” Jonathan Littell writes, “all this is turning into a story.” So ends Littell’s compilation of notebooks from his time in Homs, in western Syria, reporting for Le Monde on a “brief moment” (January 16 to February 2, 2012) in the ongoing uprising against the Assad regime. Almost immediately after his departure, he notes in an epilogue, many of the activists, opposition forces, and neighborhoods he documents here were “crushed in a bloodbath that, as I write these lines, is still going on.” The phrase “as I write these lines” first appeared in the French edition of the notebooks, published

There’s a shorthand phrase in Israel for describing the politics of war and peace that permeates everything: ha matzav, “the situation.” You might come upon a conversation between two people and ask, “What are you talking about?” And the response would simply be “the situation.”

At a party recently, I overheard someone in his twenties talking about how much he enjoyed a television show called The Fall because it made him think about how “being a man is its own kind of disease.” People of both genders nodded in a sympathetic way. If this is a moment when young people seek out opportunities for misandry, there are plenty of occasions to do so; even pulp entertainments like Game of Thrones and Mad Max: Fury Road put men at the center not to assert male power but to invite us to squirm at its failure. But

April 1948, Jerusalem: It is the fifth month of what will become a nineteen-month conflict. Seven hundred thousand Palestinians flee their homes. Eight-year-old Ghada Karmi wakes to a shattering crash. Two suitcases are packed in a hurry. Loved ones (a nanny, Fatima, and the family dog, Rex) are left behind. Following a brief exile in Syria, the family settles in London. There, Karmi becomes a doctor and a staunch activist for the Palestinian right of return. She described those events in her first memoir, In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story (Verso, 2002). This sequel narrates her own eventual return,

When the “linguistic escape artist” Christine Brooke-Rose died in 2012, at the age of eighty-nine, she was already a buried author, her formidable oeuvre little read or appreciated. With elements of science fiction, metafiction, and nouveau roman, her writing has been called “resplendently unreadable,” “incomprehensible and pretentious,” and simply “difficult.” Her 1998 novel Next, featuring twenty-six narrators and written without the verb “to have,” reappeared earlier this month from Verbivoracious Press, a “nanopress” dedicated to reissuing Brooke-Rose’s work.