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“We All Have a Fatal Flaw” and Other Aphorisms
The aphorisms below are plucked from Muriel Spark’s fiction. In the words of Penelope Jardine, editor of The Good Comb: The Sayings of Muriel Spark, “That doesn’t mean either that Dame Muriel did...
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What We Can Learn from Neruda’s Poetry of Resistance
When I first embarked on writing a biography of Pablo Neruda over a decade ago, I wanted to explore the political power of poetry and its capacity to inspire social change. Neruda’s social verse was...
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Helen DeWitt Lacerates the Literary World
Helen DeWitt. Photo: Zora Sicher. The literary world is small. Once you’ve worked a few jobs in or around the publishing industry—I’ve been an intern at a trade magazine, an editorial assistant at an...
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Ave Marías: An Interview with Javier Marías
It has been said of Anthony Trollope that as soon as he finished a novel, he turned to a fresh page and started on the next, and it’s tempting to think that Javier Marías enjoys a similarly...
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Bring Back Cortázar
Argentine writer Julio Cortázar at home in Paris. Photo: Ulf Andersen / Getty Images. Sometimes I think the only thing we did in school was read Julio Cortázar. I remember taking tests on “The Night...
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My Younger Brother Spreads His Palms, Maple Leaves: Yukio Mishima’s Haiku
Yukio Mishima. Many are likely to be surprised to learn that Yukio Mishima—yes, the writer who chose to die by dazzlingly public disembowelment and decapitation in 1970—wrote haiku. When you think of...
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Mexico’s Marxist Prophet
José Revueltas, posing in a cell at Lecumberri Prison. The Hole begins with the description of what an eye sees through a confined space: the small hatch of a punishment cell that opens onto the...
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Staff Picks: Decadence, Doodles, and Deep Ends
Ana Luísa Amaral. Photo: Mattias Blomgren (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)), from Wikimedia Commons. If you think of poetry as a language at its purest and most distilled,...
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Staff Picks: Death, Dávila, and Darkness
Amparo Dávila. Last Friday, when temperatures dropped into the bone-chilling teens, a crowd of about thirty people dipped out of the cold into Aeon Bookstore on East Broadway and Essex, where they...
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Back to the Essence
Three-year-old girl riding an Arabian horse. Miragexv at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. “The Bridge 94 (Demo),” by Mobb Deep featuring Big Noyd, went unreleased for twenty...
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