Magnificent Octopus

Some ways of seeing women and their sexuality and way of being in the world, as expressed by John Berger in his novel G.  ... On physical se...

He believed that Nietzsche, he said presently, had taken for his motto a phrase of Pindar's: become what you are. [...] If he understood...

Hygiene's not a major concern of mine.  At some point I realized that boys and girls are taught differently about how to keep their inti...

The artist Louise Bourgeois, for example, was suddenly all the rage in her last years and finally allowed to come out of the closet and be s...

A new edition of The Hearing Trumpet , by Leonora Carrington, is out from NYRB Classics, featuring an afterword by Olga Tokarczuk. I'm d...

The ink and the blood in the turquoise water: these are the colors inside the fucking. Is blue the color of hope or of despair? Bluets , by ...

On my CV it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is...

August. Two-thirty in the afternoon. Everything before our eyes burned white, and the sky was a perfect blue over the buildings, the total b...

(Passion must hurl itself against time. Lovers fuck time together so that it opens, advances, withdraws upon itself and bends backwards. Tim...

The creative energy seems to be related to that gushing of emotional force slightly diverted by a soothing hand. reassurance of the right ki...

So much profundity: "To look is an act of choice." "To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it." "F...

"Gawd, mom," says the girl. "You're such a nerd." She's wide-eyed as I giddily skim the hardcopy course notes sh...

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 ...