My first contact with Dostoevsky’s novels was rather belated, I am ashamed to say. It came only when I was twenty-two. And what is more, it was in a sense imposed on me by circumstances. The conditions of my undertaking …
In the time of the war lords and of the Koumintang, it was not so hard for leftists, even Stalinists, to write something readable about China. Your leftist went there in person, and afterwards reported frankly what he had seen …
Imagine Don Quixote without his horse and his drooping whiskers, and you will get a fair idea of what George Orwell looked like. He was a tall and angular man, with a worn Gothic face that was elongated by vertical …
Kafka’s recent entry into Russia has a history of its own. For several decades the visionary from Prague belonged—theoreticall he still belongs—to the Unholy Trinity of Proust, Joyce, and Kafka. This Trinity has been condemned in Russia on every possible …
The author of this story—which first appeared in the Polish magazine Kultura published in Paris—is at present serving a five-year term at forced labor somewhere in the Soviet Union. He was recently sentenced together with another Russian writer, Abram Tertz. …
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death by Albert Camus. Knopf. 272 pp. $4.00. By comparison with the work of men like Koestler, Silone and Orwell, Albert Camus’ writing has always seemed to me somewhat grandiose and porous. He lacked Koestler’s capacity for …
I am setting down the following melancholy reflections not with any hope of a remedy, but because the matter is important and nobody else seems to be saying it. In many ways literature has, in this century, become a minor …
How did Western media accounts transform China’s Xinjiang region from an obscure, exotic district into a hotbed of terrorism?
For Willis, rock was sex, which was Freud, which was Marx, which was labor, which was politics and therefore a reason to vote or protest.
The house in Sister Wives looks less like the home of a fundamentalist family than a functional commune.
This year Gulf Labor’s newly formed direct-action wing—the Global Ultra Luxury Faction—has created a PR nightmare for the Guggenheim.
Did Pussy Riot’s protest change the course of Russian history, or merely make its members famous abroad?
How did the largest city in the United States become the most prone to flooding?
Today’s wealth and employment gaps shatter the myth of a post-racial America.
What we have observed in Ukraine confirms that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is irredeemable.
