A ll the men in Juan Carlos Onetti’s fiction wear hats: not caps, but proper Borsalinos, wide-brimmed and pinched and cocked at the top into Jean Arp sculptures, gray or black with a subtle silk ...

To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara. Doubleday. 720 pages. $32.50. For many months it’s been predicted, its arrival declared inevitable. The experts have been consulted, and the think pieces have urged ...

Warhol, by Blake Gopnik. Ecco. 976 pages. $45. One thing I miss is the time when America had big dreams about the future. Now it seems like nobody has big hopes for the future. We all seem to think ...

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Our misunderstanding of relevance may come from a single word in the OED definition: “Appropriate or applicable in the (esp. current) context.”In the age of Twitter feeds and nonstop news, our ...

Listen to an audio version of this article. Does anyone believe in college education anymore? Republicans certainly don’t—a mere 19 percent of them expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of ...

Sheila and I were best friends from age ten to thirteen. I lived four blocks from our grade school and she two. She’d wait for me to pass her house in the morning and then we’d fall in step as we ...

Ninety minutes west of Boston, up the road from a Benedictine monastery, lies what is perhaps the most studied forest on Earth. Since 1907, when the first of these 3,850 acres of black oak and red ...

On stupidity and transcendence. In 1943, after being interrogated by Vichy police officers who suspected him (rightly) of conspiring to rescue Jews from the occupying Nazis, a French clergyman named ...

As good as it might look, this lyrical burst is almost entirely collage. “Such join’d” is the start of the third line in the original, and the poem is from then on interspersed with repetitions of the ...

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 turn of the nineteenth century, the publisher and bookseller William Faden was well known in London for his printing of maps. His first work of note was the North American Atlas in 1777; its ...