The new kind of AI skincare ad is a subgenre in a rampant category that I have come to think of as “Purification Slop." ...

Natalie Shapero’s poem “The Top of Hell,” which appears in our new Fall issue, no. 257, is nominally about the top of Hell, ...

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 ...

May 16, 2019 – Fotonovela, fumetti, roman-photo—the form, which never got much traction in Anglo-Saxon countries, was associated with the poor and unlettered, the naive and sheltered and perhaps ...

Anne Carson and I met on Zoom last October, in the brick-red sitting room of her apartment in Reykjavik, the city where she and her husband, Robert Currie, have spent time each year since 2008. A ...

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 ...

On a low-pollution Sunday last December, the weekend before Christmas, I headed to People’s Park on Shanghai’s Nanjing Road to visit the city’s so-called marriage market: a cluster of footpaths and ...

Halfway through her 1981 autobiographical novel, Baby Driver, the story of her hectic, careening life as a young bohemian woman traveling through North and South America in the sixties and seventies, ...

On a stretch of rural road not far from my house, there is a small wood where, once a year, for just a few short and cold days, the ground turns a magnificent shade of purple. In a reversal of ...

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 ...

I encountered Joan Didion’s famous line about why she writes—“entirely to find out what I’m thinking”—many times before I read the essay it comes from, and was reminded once again to never assume you ...

Like its elusive hero, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854) is difficult to pin down. It has the distinction of being the first novel published in California, the first novel published by ...