What a sensible idea of Ashbery’s, I thought, and modest—to direct attention away from himself. It also worked to his own benefit; he was more interested in exploring these other poets and ...

Tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees settled in Toronto in the Eighties, and word spread among them that worm picking was a sure way to make money, albeit a punishing one. Pickers ruin their knees ...

W hen Frankenthaler was visiting Spain in 1953, her friend Sonya Rudikoff wrote to her and asked for her impressions of political life under Franco. She did not answer the question. “She had more ...

Discussed in this essay: Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, by Karl Marx. Edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press. 944 pages.

Cymbidium Lowianum, a color lithograph by Joseph Mansell, after a painting by Henry George Moon from Reichenbachia: Orchids Illustrated and Described, Second Series, Vol. 2, Tab 53, c. 1888–94, by ...

“P aul says I’m just dicknotized.” Paul is Lily’s gay best friend and closest romantic confidant. Grating portmanteaus are a crucial part of their relationship. “Dickmatized?” I pronounce the word ...

Discussed in this essay: Alice James: A Biography, by Jean Strouse. Picador. 416 pages. $20. Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, by Jean Strouse. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 336 ...

Is Donald Trump a fascist or a plutocrat?I t is powerfully tempting to call the new president of the United States a fascist. Donald Trump’s bullying tone, his scowl, and his jutting jaw recall Benito ...

I n the mid-Nineties, I spent about eighteen months working as an editor for the British edition of a new magazine called Wired, which had been founded in San Francisco as a sort of house journal of ...

Discussed in this essay: The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45. T his buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous ...

I didn’t go to high school. This I think of as one of my proudest accomplishments and one of my greatest escapes, because everyone who grows up in the United States goes to high school. It’s such an ...

Siringo arrived in Los Angeles in 1923, in time to see the hollywoodland sign go up. Two of his books, A Texas Cowboy and A Cowboy Detective, gave him cachet among writers of detective fiction, such ...