Leigh’s essay on the nostalgia industry can’t help but take us on some nostalgia trips of our own. The grammar of the piece subordinates “nostalgia” (for Leigh, the cynical effort to turn childhood icons into formulae for commercial success) to… Continue Reading
I have never been to Newfoundland, but after a summer’s love affair with Annie Proulx, I felt as though I knew it, its craggy shores and rugged, weathered hands, the sheer breadth of its horizon. The Shipping News had occupied… Continue Reading
“I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else,” a character says in the closing lines of Todd Hayne’s pitch-perfect Bob Dylan film, I’m Not There.“ I don’t
Even if we couldn’t name five horror movies, let alone one horror novel, we still know horror when we see it: its tropes are alleys in our cultural city, and in the course of our travels, we pass themwhetheror
When I visited my parents for Thanksgiving, we went to our favorite movie theater. It plays art house movies, features an organ player before the show, and is decorated with very whimsical stars and angel statues on the ceiling. It… Continue Reading
Dear Reader: Growing up is hard—all our stories tell us so. From “Little Red Riding Hood” to Toy Story 3, we’re always retelling, revising, and reinventing tales about the perils and possibilities of childhood, the awkward camaraderie of adolescence, the… Continue Reading
In the medieval French epic La Chanson de Roland, Charlemagne’s Christian Franks battle Marsile’s pagan Saracens in Spain. The latter have feigned defeat to trick the invaders into leaving; the formermustnow
Where does the mind go when we take a walk? Does it extend to touch the land, or play off corners of a new room? Do my thoughts intersect in the space between me and a car moving toward us,… Continue Reading
To The Editors, I was praying in Jerusalem the other day and I thought of The Bad Version. Perhaps a circuit lit up in the mind of God that let these very letters flow—through my hand, out my pen, onto… Continue Reading
If the ultimate homecoming of death happens when you’re far from home—on vacation, or on business, or while in some distant and dissociated emotional state—your whole life must suddenly become fraught
About halfway through Katherine’s essay, she relates the story of the madwoman who maltreats her boys, locking away the sugar, feeding them raw food until they are sick, denying them access to medical care. The
It is late November in lower Manhattan, three days before Thanksgiving. At the Urban Outfitters in SoHo, beyond an entranceway strategically crackled with confetti, past a greeter, gaunt and sparkling from sleek beret top to sequined peep-toe shoe, a center… Continue Reading
Listening to music I love with someone who doesn’t is a painful experience. It often ends with me turning off the music, sheepishly apologizing for sounds that only the day before inspired raptures of emotion, babblings
This year a man who has carried on multiple affairs, divorced two wives, and requested one open marriage was endorsed to run for president by a southern state where all the “family values” stuff, the so-called “social
To ask how we read is to enter a heavily contested warzone. If you dare to peer through the heavy smoke thrown up by all the busted ordnances, you can make out a bunch of half-animate bodies. Few have been… Continue Reading