But they are being constantly claimed and reclaimed, while for a long time it seemed that everybody wanted a piece of ...

The lines kept playing in my mind, like a song. I asked a few people, neighbors, street sellers, drivers, ‘What are you going ...

The office administrator would have thought I’d lost my mind if I’d turned in all those receipts. I hid them from her and ...

Agosto Machado’s apartment and studio on East Third Street is crammed, floor to ceiling, with steel bookcases bursting with ...

In December 1903, Thomas Mann wrote his older brother, Heinrich, a long letter reviewing the latter’s novel—with brutal candor. Some of the most scathing bits are below. The complete missive is in The ...

As it so happened, I was visiting a college on the East Coast a few years ago to talk about contemporary Italian literature. Right before my lecture, a small group of comparative literature students ...

I have been a stalwart advocate for the legacy of Charles White. I have said it so often, it could go without saying. I have always believed that his work should be seen wherever great pictures are ...

My new job came with a research stipend. I’d never had one before—a few grand that would renew each year for five years and then end. What could I use it for? “Anything,” I was told, which seemed ...

Montreal/Paris/London/New York/Berlin/Chicago/Seoul/Amsterdam/Mexico City/Tokyo/Vancouver/Los Angeles. In the Day-Glo light ...

An encounter with Emerson’s essays. This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as ...

In the early thirties, for a certain clique of Left Bank–dwelling American lesbians, the place to be was not an expat haunt like the Café de Flore or Le Deux Magots. Nor was it Le Monocle, the wildly ...

Edward White’s monthly column, “Off Menu,” serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times. When a devastating cholera pandemic reached Italy in 1884, the disease took its heaviest ...