Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, by Alexander Nemerov. Penguin Press. 288 pages. $28. Imagine, if you will, that it’s the year 1990, and you are flipping through the magazine Art ...

The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf — that is, the boy who was believed the first few ...

From Liontaming in America, which was published last month by New Directions. I was reaching for a passage to the world they came from, the bodies slowly turning into the… ...

The Americanization of Narcissism, by Elizabeth Lunbeck. Harvard University Press. 384 pages. $35. The Narcissist Next Door: Understanding the Monster in Your Family, in Your Office, in Your Bed — in ...

When the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and a mask. This was a ...

I first read the Book of Revelation in a green pocket-size King James New Testament published by the motel missionaries Gideons International. I was in seventh grade. I remember reading the tiny Bible ...

About a year into the global coronavirus pandemic, hunkered down in West Philadelphia and searching—this will be familiar—for a lifeline, I corralled five of my best beloveds worldwide into an ...

Audition, by Katie Kitamura. Riverhead Books. 208 pages. $28. One third of the way into Katie Kitamura’s 2017 novel, A Separation, its narrator asks an elderly Greek woman to demonstrate a traditional ...

Twenty-five years ago, the philosopher Richard Rorty accomplished something many writers aspire to but few ever pull off: he predicted the future. Toward the end of his 1998 book Achieving Our Country ...

The word “relevant,” I was recently surprised to discover, shares an etymology with the word “relieve.” This seems obvious enough once you know it—only a few letters separate the words—but their ...

My father always stressed the importance of blood — being worthy of it, showing loyalty to it, protecting what he called the purity of it. He was, as people sometimes say of well-educated racists, not ...

Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...