One of Latin America's greatest novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa is also a most acute and wide-ranging cultural critic and an acerbic political commentator. Touchstones includes his readings of major twentieth-century novels, from Heart of Darkness...
Just weeks after multiple disasters struck Japan, National Book Award winner William T. Vollmann ventures into the nuclear hot zone, outfitted only with rubber kitchen gloves, a cloth facemask, and a capricious radiation detector. In this Byliner...
In ten of her best essay-stories, Giedra Radvilavičiūtė travels between the ridiculous and the sublime, the everyday and the extraordinary. In the place of plot, which the author claims to have had "shot and buried with the...
Deported to a concentration camp from 1941 until the end of the war, Norman Manea again left his native Romania in 1986 to escape the Ceausescu regime. He now lives in New York. In this selection of essays, he explores the language and psyche of the...
George Orwell’s payment book for 20 December 1943 records the sum of pounds 5.5.0 for a special article of 2,000 words for Tribune. This has never been traced in Tribune under Orwell’s name but it now seems certain that an essay, entitled “Can...
Since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, there has been much talk of a new Cold War between the West and Russia. Under Putin’s authoritarian leadership, Moscow is widely seen as volatile, belligerent and bent on using military force to get its...
From “one of his generation’s most inventive and gifted writers” (The New York Times) , intimate and sharply observed commentary on life, art, politics, and “the war on terror.”
Mohsin Hamid’s brilliant, moving, and extraordinarily...