Magnificent Octopus

Here are some amazing passages from J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories . Full portraits in miniature. This is a masterclass not only in crafti...

"Find your place... and wait." Zgubiona Dusza , written by Olga Tokarczuk and illustrated by Joanna Concejo, will be available in ...

It is a kind of miracle whenever we meet anyone who truly moves us. We don't meet many of these people in one lifetime — the people who ...

I'm good at beginnings. I've had millions of them. Beginnings are easy. Practice makes perfect.  And most of them have had endings. ...

Stamped on a poster next to the book is the face of a handsome man, too handsome, maybe: tousled hair, a weather-scarred complexion, melanch...

There's something frustrating about  Leave the World Behind , by Rumaan Alam. It's so compulsively readable, so well blurbed and gen...

Without agreeing to do so, we made it a thing not to call anything by its name, not to talk of cocks and vaginas and not to make love the wa...

The time of my adolescence is slow, made up of large gray blocks and sudden humps of color, green or red or purple. The blocks don't hav...

I wondered whether, if I spent long enough with it, the machine would distill the essence of my work out of me the way I had never quite man...

The mushrooms glowed brighter, and she thought perhaps later she might touch them, running her hands against the wall and settling her face ...

I didn't know I needed to read this book. Three , by D.A. Mishani , was the perfect antidote to what had been a disappointing reading we...

Buying things requires at least a rudimentary level of optimism — indeed, why buy the most recent critical edition of Henry James's comp...

Meanwhile, I'd taken my courage in both hands, turned my first trick, at home, a chubby little guy, about sixty, who chain-smoked untipp...

That was the first chapter. The second chapter is next. It is loosely related to the first, but this isn't some perfectly sequential mas...

little scratch  by  Rebecca Watson  was a brilliant surprise, an unexpected one-sitting read.  instead I think          about art galleries ...

There certainly is what doctors call a "migraine personality," and that personality tends to be ambitious, inward, intolerant of e...

She walked through the market stands with her new stride, at once lazy and confident, loose and firm, looking at everything and knowing she...

In a man, not liking women is a pose. In a woman, not liking men is a pathology. Sounds a little like Atwood's, "Men are afraid tha...

The ways of the heart cannot be explained. It does what it wants. This morning I woke up and allowed myself a moment of wistfulness, I watch...