Am I Alone Here? (Peter Orner)
A personal collection of essays that blurs the line between literary criticism and personal memoir.
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The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)
Set in the ruthless high society of Gilded Age New York, The House of Mirth traces the tragic downward spiral of Lily Bart, a beautiful but impoverished woman whose moral conscience repeatedly prevents her from securing a wealthy marriage for survival.
Read more →The Undiscovered Chekhov (Anton Chekhov)
Unpublished works collected and translated by Peter Constantine
Read more →Transcription (Ben Lerner)
A former student travels to interview his 90ish professor for a magazine article. His recording device (an iPhone) breaks just before…
Read more →Feelings (Ruth Ozeki)
A short story about how to achieve empathy through compassion and imagination using the complexities of young children and adults as a prism.
Read more →The Discovery of Heaven (Harry Mulisch)
The Discovery of Heaven is framed by an ongoing conversation between two angels in heaven, looking down upon Earth. God has become profoundly disillusioned with humanity—specifically our technological arrogance, moral failures, and the dangerous hubris of splitting the atom. Feeling that mankind has broken its side of the spiritual bargain, God decides to terminate His covenant with the world. To do this, he demands the retrieval of the physical stone tablets containing the original Ten Commandments, removing them from the...
Read more →American Wealth Pizza
A pizza graphic representing how many slices of pie Americans are getting.
Read more →Artist Anthony Triano
New Jersey Artist and Sculptor Anthony Triano (1928-97)
Read more →BBC 3-hour David Attenborough Nature Feature
Three hours of incredible best-of BBC David Attenborough Nature features.
Read more →Making a Poem with Kindling
Making a poem with kindling is easy. Gather allusions and pine needles…
Read more →On the ending of Colbert's Late Night
CBS caved, law firms caved, Tech giants caved. Colbert instead has the entire CBS building sucked into a green vortex, shrunk, and put into a snow globe
Read more →I tramp a perpetual journey (Whitman)
Section 46, Song of Myself, Walt Whitman
Read more →I'm applying for my part of the Trump Slush Fund
It’s time to stake a claim in the new $1.776 billion slush fund for those targeted unfairly by the government. I will accept nothing less than $5 million for: the fact that every day I have to be living with the shame of being an American; that my subscription to media outlets I had formerly enjoyed now are brim full with the evil committed by a salacious regime only moderately acquainted with the Constitution or the nation’s history; that their...
Read more →Tolstoy Diary Entry
Tolstoy diary entry as a young man
Read more →Vigil (George Saunders)
a woman who died tragically in her early twenties during the 1970s and now serves as an ethereal death doula.
Read more →Mother River (Can Xue)
Short stories from renowned Chinese author Can Xue.
Read more →Musems and Women and other stories (John Updike)
A collection of short stories.
Read more →To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969 (Larry Levis)
Larry Levis brings raw emotion to his poetry; “To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969” goes from zero to sixty in 3 seconds.
Read more →Satantango (László Krasznahorkai)
Labyrinthine masterpiece that captures the slow-motion collapse of a Hungarian collective farm.
Read more →Palestinian Walks (Raja Shehadeh)
A series of reflective essays about moving through the landscapes of the West Bank and Gaza region.
Read more →The Guest House (Jalaluddin Rumi)
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival....
Read more →Time is Joy (“El tiempo es alegría”) (Pablo Neruda)
Pablo Neruda poem.
Read more →The Golden House (Salman Rushdie)
Nero Golden, patriarch in his twilight, a Lear in a silk dressing gown, presiding over a trio of sons who embody current fractured anxieties.
Read more →The Assault (Harry Mulisch)
A truly remarkable novel that begins with a tragic turn of events for the Steenwijk family
Read more →The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Matsuo Bashō)
Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a travel narrative recounting an 1689 journey cross-country.
Read more →Stoner (John Williams)
It’s all spoilers below, so get the book and read it. I found it engaging, though I have a bit of trouble with the premise some back of the book blurb makes about ‘readers worldwide’ are coming to a new appreciation of this book. William Stoner feels stuck on a family farm, performing the same chores day-in-day-out. Perhaps his parents pick up on this and decide to send him to university to pursue a course in agriculture, which he gladly...
Read more →The Enigma of Arrival (V.S. Naipaul)
V.S. Naipaul novel about an immigrant's experience of England.
Read more →Tomorrow x3 (Gabrielle Zevin)
A friend’s daughter was assigned this book in class (high school) and she recommended it highly, so I figured, ok, I know she’s a bright young woman with a dad with good taste in friends, so I read the first free chapters and was hooked. First, it’s about the gaming industry, second it’s about young entrepreneurs, third it’s about friendship, fourth it has allegorical underpinnings from a certain Greek epic, fifth, it touches on many contemporary hot-button political issues regarding...
Read more →Shadow Ticket (Thomas Pynchon)
Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket arrives like a cipher slipped under the door of contemporary America.
Read more →What We Can Know (Ian McEwan)
The thematic core of the novel interrogates the limits of knowledge and memory.
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