Thirty years ago, the world lost a great literary mind—the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. Today, Elizabeth Hyde Stevens revisits the financial conditions that produced this life of pure literature, finding unexpected hope in the darkest period of Borges’ forgotten past.
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Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
A Stranger in the World: The Memoir of a Musician on Tour
The Hold Steady’s Franz Nicolay on DIY touring in the punk underground of the former Soviet Union.
Posted inNonfiction
A Dead Superhero Is a Marvelous Corpse
A theory of superhero suffering and death.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Bill and Doug Got Married
What a difference 10 years makes: Justin Heckert’s 2005 Atlanta magazine feature about two men in Georgia whose marriage was not recognized by the state.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Starring in Japanese Reality TV
Nagging questions and doubts remain. Have we somehow prostituted ourselves for the vicarious entertainment of television viewers? Has the private language, the intimate currency of our happy household, been debased by making it public? I had thought it would be ‘fun.’ I was wrong. But somehow it has felt like an education of sorts — […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
This Is to Mother You: On Caring for a Toxic Parent in Her Greatest Time of Need
When her challenging, cancer-ridden mother suffers a psychotic break, Jane Demuth searches for the wherewithal to help the person who once demanded the most of her.
Posted inFiction, Quotes
Honeymooning with Elizabeth Taylor, and Crying All the While: The Fiction of Margot Hentoff
The Harper’s digital archive is a small and unsung national treasure, at least as far as I’m concerned; I’ve spent countless hours sifting through old issues, scanning for early work from familiar names and tracking down forgotten gems from authors whose bylines have largely faded. One such writer is Margot Hentoff, whose short story “Where Do […]
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction
The Mask of Deception: The Ultimate Test to My Recovery From Porn Addiction
Novelist Benjamin Obler was feeling secure in his recovery from porn addiction. Then along came Franny, to test it.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
The Fierce and Misty Flood: Barbara Comyns on the Quiet Seduction
Barbara Comyns’s novel Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950) follows the doomed marriage of two young, bohemian artists during England’s Great Depression. The excerpt below is a simple, gentle seduction; I love the way in which the protagonist, Sophia, swiftly and casually dismisses her husband and her own sense of identity. The scene strikes me […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Romantic Landscape: Going Mad in the Eternal City
How terrifying. I’m glad you’re recovering, I write back. I’m at a dinner party in Rome and I think I’m having some kind of breakdown. I’m scared. I’m not sure who I am anymore and I don’t have a concussion to blame it on. Or Percodan. Can you email Percodan? Sounds like we’re in the […]
