The Sense of an Ending
The Silence is full of voices, a work of talky minimalism whose characters are all troubled by the absence of sound. Five of them, three men...
The Dream of Pure Expression
Although I have not visited the graveyard in the French town of Sète that is the subject of Paul Valéry’s extraordinary poem “Le Cimetière Marin” (“The...
Cartographers of Stone and Air
The English writer and cartographer Tim Robinson, who died from Covid-19 in April at the age of eighty-five, dedicated more than forty years of his life...
An Undisappearing Act
There were three people at the funeral of Mary Ellen Meredith when she died at the age of forty, in 1861: two women servants and an...
In the Soup
Each human culture has its own origin myths. The Telefol, a mountain people of New Guinea, relate that in the beginning there was a mother called...
Making London Their Own
In Britain, as in the rest of Europe and the US, the Black Lives Matter movement and the severe effects of Covid-19 on Black, Asian, and...
The Sirens
First Saturday of the month and unlike the Greeks,sometime ancient cynics of beautyand warning, these sirens at least test the level of dog agony in town....
They Were Hungarians
To the Editors: Diarmaid MacCulloch’s review of John Anthony McGuckin’s history of the Eastern Orthodox Church [“The Vitality of Orthodoxy,” NYR, July 2] is a concise...
A Proper Burial
To the Editors: In his review of Megan Rosenbloom’s Dark Archives [NYR, November 5], Mike Jay quotes me and summarizes my opinion about a book at...
The Devil Had Nothing to Do With It
There’s an old blues metaphor. You know, Robert Johnson found his sound at the crossroad when he made a deal with the devil. It seems to...
