Richard E. Maltby Jr. on his fifty years of writing puzzles for Harper’s Magazine, his side hustle as a musical lyricist and Tony Award–winning director, and the crossword’s place in contemporary Amer ...

After the tumult of the 2008 financial crisis, the investor Bill Gross, known as “The Bond King,” was ill at ease. He’d bet on the government and against the housing market. In doing so, he made a ...

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 ...

A few years ago, my relationship to darkness had turned a bit fanatical. I was living on the Canadian Prairies in Regina, Saskatchewan, and I’d found my way into a regimen of extreme early rising.

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 ...

Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in ...

I’ve never wanted to be pregnant, and I’ve been pregnant three times. Each time I learned the news, my commitment to what I’d already known was confirmed viscerally and instantaneously—with the ...

I first read the Book of Revelation in a green pocket-size King James New Testament published by the motel missionaries Gideons International. I was in seventh grade. I remember reading the tiny Bible ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...