I am chatting with a woman in a clothing store as our conversation moves from friendly small talk to the anxiety of raising children. My conversation partner, who is a few parenting years ahead of me, is lamenting dangers that now seem rampant for children, ones her preteen will face the closer she gets to…

How to image good and evil? It’s hard to do in a way that astounds us afresh with how they penetrate every aspect of our lives. Yet Jeanne Murray Walker manages to do this in “God Reads the Poem of the World with Interest.” Evil is terrifyingly concrete: men setting a boy’s mother on fire…

One such patient, under my care, describes how he must “wake up” his phantom in the mornings: first he flexes the thigh-stump towards him, and then he slaps it sharply—“like a bay’s bottom”—several times. On the fifth or sixth slap the phantom suddenly shoots forth, rekindled, fulgurated, by the peripheral stimulus. —Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook…

For a few years in the late 1990s, early 2000s, I brought a book of poetry with me whenever I went to synagogue for Shabbat morning services. After I was settled into my pew, I’d discreetly slip the book out of my tallis (prayer shawl) bag, tuck the thin volume of poetry inside the thick…

From Chris Stapleton’s rootsy repurposing of Nashville pop-country to Sturgill Simpson’s “metamodern” new-Outlaw nihilism, the past few years have seen Kentucky-born artists setting the agenda for a different kind of country music—not so much a complete break with the past as a series of unpredictable mash-ups of what’s come before. Simpson protégé Tyler Childers is…

My favorite film from last year is a farce. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread functions like a twisted screwball comedy: Its momentum is the back-and-forth seeking of the upper hand in the relationship between Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Alma (Vicky Krieps). But narrative momentum does not always move the viewer. Anderson’s films can be…

Wilkinson welcomes us into his poem with ease and familiarity, referencing “Sean” and “Jens” like we are all old friends chatting to kill time on our commute. The conversation begins with the mention of the “anaconda / they had found once / in Sean’s cattle pasture” and moves swiftly through visceral, associative memories: cleaning pigskins,…

The sun was high in the sky. Midday, late July. The light was washed out. The black of the asphalt was washed out, not even gray anymore, not even a color. Albuquerque is divided between the people who, at midday, go elsewhere and the people who don’t go elsewhere. As I said it was midday,…

In twenty years (maybe fewer?) will people still be reading what we’ve come to call the “literary” novel? Considering how fast technology is changing the imaginative landscape, is it really preposterous to say that the serious novel as we know it will have receded into a connoisseur culture, an affectation indulged in by a respectable…

At first I didn’t know that I was dying. I’d been rushed to the hospital emergency department because I couldn’t breathe, put on oxygen and wheeled right to Intensive Care. The week or so in ICU is a blur now. But ICU must have been where it was discovered that my kidneys were failing—because I…