Close Enough to Touch
July 26, 2023
Brooks Lamb— It’s 1999, and I’m five years old. I’m with my family in the long patch by the road, just a few hundred feet away from the four-way stop…. READ MORE
Tag: memoir
Prologue: Our Time
May 4, 2023
In a small front room, amid the unfamiliar smells of Gauloise tobacco smoke and strong black coffee, I sit with my French host family staring at a small black-and-white television… READ MORE
Hocus Bogus
January 11, 2023
Romain Gary writing as Émile Ajar— There is no beginning. I was begotten—just like you—and since then I’ve been lumbered. I tried to get out of it every way I… READ MORE
Our Days Are Like Full Years
October 19, 2020
On a winter day in 1953, a mysterious man in a sheepskin coat stood out to Harriet Pattison, then a theater student at Yale. She would later learn he was… READ MORE
The Punishment
April 21, 2020
Tahar Ben Jelloun— July 16, 1966, is one of those mornings that my mother has tucked away in a corner of her memory, she says, so she can remember to… READ MORE
Why Munch Painted
November 12, 2019
Karl Ove Knausgaard— I knew why Munch painted, I knew it so well that I could articulate it with a single sentence. And it resembles the sentence spoken by the… READ MORE
Patrick Modiano on Childhood
December 9, 2015
In the past year, Patrick Modiano has been hailed by American book critics for his Nobel Prize-winning literary art, rightly described as “elegant,” “haunting,” and “urbane.” In books such as Suspended Sentences,… READ MORE
Translating Trans-Atlantyk: Behind the Scenes with Danuta Borchardt
September 29, 2014
Many consider Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz one of the greatest writers of the past hundred years and Danuta Borchardt is undoubtedly one of his finest translators. Her rendering of Ferdydurke… READ MORE
The Challenge of Casanova