From The Old Man by the Sea by Domenico Starnone (Europa Editions), translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky: ...

Really playing a character is about a lot more than whether you have to take your shirt off. Sometimes you do, sometimes you ...

The story refers to the twins’ father’s participation in “the Slaughter, when all animal life was being extinguished by guns ...

Our seminal blonde, Lorelei Lee, comes from Little Rock, Arkansas, with a dubious backstory full of intrigue. An archetypal faux-naïf, she uses her perceived naïveté to get the better of the gentlemen ...

Vladimir Sorokin, however, is alive; he is quite alive, and when I asked him how and why (along with a clutch of other ...

Doodling today is not what it was. Or is it? Google “doodle” and you’ll find the Google Doodle—what Google calls a “fun, surprising, and sometimes spontaneous” transformation of its logo by a team of ...

Chartreuse (the color name) was recorded in print for the first time in 1884, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, but artists had long been using the intense shade to depict the joys and ...

October 28, 2019 – Umberto Eco on the merits of imperfect works of art, including ‘The Count of Monte Cristo,’ ‘Hamlet,’ and ‘Casablanca.’ ...

Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start ...

October 20, 2020 – I’ve been thinking on russet lately, this color of oak and Rembrandt and austerity. Its terra-cotta earthiness fits my mood.

Next to the shifting and dated definition of millennial pink, the green-blue spectrum is perhaps my favorite color quandary. It’s a surprisingly loaded issue: where one ends and the other begins, and ...

February 14, 2024 – “I’d conjured a fantasy of a finance boy, and here he was, in the flesh, as radiantly banal and enthrallingly uninteresting as I’d expected him to be.” ...