Magnificent Octopus

For an entire year I spent my allowance on expensive medical books, while my friends all spent theirs on drugs. Nothing brought me as much h...

We are so schooled, he said, in the doctrine of self-acceptance that the idea of refusing to accept yourself becomes quite radical. I don...

I approached the beautiful woman, who had never looked so seductive as today in her cruelty, in her scorn. "Another step," Wanda o...

Curfew starts tonight. The province-wide reminder alert prompts me to make my way home. Helicopters circle overhead. At 7:36 pm, a man sits ...

This is what fascinates me: not writing as art, I've spent my whole adult life trying to understand that, never figuring out what it is,...

[Why do I look for signs? To be pointed in the right direction. Why do I recognize some signs and not others? Because I already know where I...

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...