For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages.

My friend gave me the packet of letters to keep, and I knew that one day I would try to make something out of it.” ...

It seems certain to me that, on the same walk, two beings, unless they resemble each other in some strange sense, could not ...

New books from Leonora Carrington, Michael Clune, John Gregory Dunne, Marlen Haushofer, Eloghosa Osunde, and Gary Shteyngart.

May 20, 2025 – On retro screen savers, Bianca Rae Messinger’s pleasureis amiracle, and Grandma’s iMac.

Though he is most often associated with New England, Robert Frost (1874–1963) was born in San Francisco. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, taught school like his mother did before him, and ...

A 1,650-pound American bucking bull named Man Hater paused at the entrance to the Madison Square Garden floor and fixed me with his dark, soulful eyes. “Hi, puppy,” I said. A bearded wrangler scoffed.

The following short story by Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), newly translated by John Nathan, was first published in the June 1965 issue of Nihon (Japan) magazine. 1. That morning, for the first time in a ...

A young Henry James, writing about Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1879, notoriously remarked, “One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the ...

Franz Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog” might be retitled “Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog.” In any event, Kafka did not assign a title to the story, which he left unpublished and ...

I was ten years old when I forgot how to sleep. I’d get into bed and focus very hard on trying to switch my conscious mind off, but the effort was self-defeating. I didn’t like spending so many hours ...

August 12, 2024 – The following five letters were written by the poet Seamus Heaney, all in the spring of 1995. The Paris Review’s interview with Heaney, referenced in his ...