It is a matter of necessity or a choice freely made; a burdensome condition or a vintage-Polaroid fantasy: to live in a van.

The moment I lost my fertility I started searching for a baby. At age thirty-one, after almost two decades of chronic pain caused by endometriosis and its little-studied ravages, I had my uterus, my ...

In 1974, my mother was twenty years old, trying to make it as a theater actress in New York after dropping out of Bennington College. She was in a painting class led by the eccentric Ukrainian-Jewish ...

The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45. This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I ...

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I led a virtual discussion of War and Peace, with the thought that someone else might enjoy reading the novel with me. Three thousand people ended up ...

The Other Name: Septology I–II, by Jon Fosse. Translated by Damion Searls. Transit Books. 336 pages. $17.95. I Is Another: Septology III–V, by Jon Fosse. Translated by Damion Searls. Transit Books.

Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in U.S. and Mexican Culture, by Oswaldo Zavala, translated by William Savinar. Vanderbilt University Press. 206 pages. $34.95. The Dope: The Real History of ...

Chuck Berry: An American Life, by RJ Smith. Hachette. 432 pages. $32. By the time Chuck Berry had his breakout hit “Maybellene” in the summer of 1955, he was already nearly thirty years old, with ...

When the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and a mask. This was a ...

The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, by Jon Meacham. Random House. 416 pages. $20. The Soul of America, directed by KD Davison. HBO, 2020. 77 minutes. It’s the beginning of the new ...

I went to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005 because I’d won a writing prize, and with that prize came an invitation to a luncheon and awards ceremony. Each honoree was allowed to bring ...

On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger, translated from the German by Tess Lewis. New York Review Books. 144 pages. $14.95. Ernst Jünger is the intractable land mine of German literature. Demolition ...