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On the morning of my 20th birthday I strolled down Central Park South in the bright September breeze and set out on what would eventually become one of my longest [...]

In 1913 the French publishing house Grasset released Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, the first installment of what has since become one of the most important novels in literary history. [...]

Of all the films with anachronistically modern values, none perhaps is greater than The Shop Around the Corner. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch and released in 1940, this film tells the [...]

Among the spy and detective fiction writers of today there is no distinction more dubious than 'transcending the genre.' What does it mean for a work to transcend the genre? [...]

One of the most nuanced conversations about post-war American anti-Semitism came in the form of a film. In 1947 Elia Kazan released Gentleman's Agreement, starring Gregory Peck as a gentile [...]

Books mark periods of time. Dracula was winter 2007. The Leopard was summer 2016. I can dog-ear moments in my life by the books I was reading. In a lot [...]

Every Friday, our resident film fanatic Alex Aciman will dig deep into the pile of cinematic masterpieces and fish out one forgotten classic you should watch soonest. It has been [...]

Every Friday, our resident film fanatic Alex Aciman will dig deep into the pile of cinematic masterpieces and fish out one forgotten classic you should watch soonest. Before The Bridge [...]

Keith Gessen's newest novel, A Terrible Country, takes place in the year 2008, but its true backdrop is actually the Russia of old literatureof strange superstitions, of political turmoil so [...]

Every Friday, our resident film fanatic Alex Aciman will dig deep into the pile of cinematic masterpieces and fish out one forgotten classic you should watch soonest. In 1946, Orson [...]

Dying of flu, a woman sends a letter to the man she has loved all her lifea man who would not know her from a stranger in the street. If [...]

His name was Henri, with an I. Who could ever have thought that something so tiny, so insignificant as a letter tacked on to the end of a name would [...]

Every Friday, our resident film fanatic Alex Aciman will dig deep into the pile of cinematic masterpieces and fish out one forgotten classic you should watch soonest. If ever there [...]

Every Friday, our resident film fanatic Alex Aciman will dig deep into the pile of cinematic masterpieces and fish out one forgotten classic you should watch soonest. Even if you [...]

In Saul Bellow's collection of nonfiction There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, you probably will not find many lyrical moments, or particularly trenchant pieces that will make you [...]

Every Friday, our resident film fanatic Alex Aciman will dig deep into the pile of cinematic masterpieces and fish out one forgotten classic you should watch soonest. Although The Hustler [...]

Every Friday, our resident film fanatic Alex Aciman will dig deep into the pile of cinematic masterpieces and fish out one forgotten classic you should watch soonest. On the eve [...]

Every Friday, our resident film fanatic Alex Aciman will dig deep into the pile of cinematic masterpieces and fish out one forgotten classic you should watch soonest. Deconstructing Harry is [...]

Whatever your thoughts may be on the novels of Philip Roth, what we can say for sure is this: He helped shape the 20th century American Jewish narrative. He proliferated [...]

Every Friday, our resident film fanatic Alex Aciman will dig deep into the pile of cinematic masterpieces and fish out one forgotten classic you should watch soonest. The Ascent (1976), [...]

The fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago left a John le Carré-sized void in the world of spy fiction that would eventually be filled by D.C. political thrillers. [...]

I don't know how Sean Penn's debut novel, Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff ends. Admittedly, I don't really know how it begins either, because as it turns out reading [...]

There are two kinds of art that exist in context of the Holocaust. The first kind treats the events as a backdrop in order to tell a moralizing story, ultimately [...]

I'd never noticed them. Not in the years I spent visiting friends on 106th Street and Riverside Drive, not on walks with my dad in the 1990s down that same [...]

Can a book be epic without being great? This is a question I found myself asking again and again while reading Romain Gary's The Kites, newly translated into English for [...]

Show me a writer who can describe the world and the human mind like Arthur Koestler and I will show you someone who is playing with a handicap. For this [...]

In 1954 Turkish writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar began publishing installments of one of the world's greatest novels in desperate need of editorial intervention. Tanpinar's novel, The Time Regulation Institute, tells [...]

Oscar weekend is finally over, and now that we no longer have to wait to see which films or which performances will end up decorated with what is perhaps the [...]

In 1966, Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls was published and became an instant bestseller, and eventually one of the bestselling novels of all time. And yet, despite the fact [...]

The last 600 years of anti-hero fetishization have failed to produce anything like the title character of Ferenc Molnar's 1909 play, Liliom, the story of an unrepentant young man who [...]

The sign of a great literary noir is one that cannot decide whether it is about crime or about an existential crisis. This is the story of Paul Goldberg's novel [...]

Part of the way through the holiday-season classic Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins, I pause and ask myself, What do goblins have to do with anything in the first place? [...]

Hidden beneath a perplexingly nondescript book jacket is one of the best novels of 2017, Millard Salter's Last Day by Jacob M. Appel. Millard Salter is a wry old New [...]

We could certainly use some alternatives to social reality right now, and what better place to find them than in books? But is Benjamin Markovits' You Don't Have to Live [...]

Young Aryan girls have gone missing and are turning up dead. Who but the Jews could possibly be responsible for such a crime? Detective Bernie Gunther's world, set in the [...]

No book has a greater valley between highs and lows than The Golem, Gustav Meyrink's 1914 story of a man who inhabits the memory of another by accidentally switching hats [...]

Tell me to close my eyes, change the author's name and all the place names, read slowly aloud the first page, and I will still know right away that Vasily [...]

It's a long drag back from Brooklyn and one of the dullest in the city. Sometimes I'll catch myself narrating life to myself this way, like I've just flicked away [...]

Somewhere in this world there is a version of myself dreaming up the life I have here in New York. I am not really here, and maybe never was. This, [...]

'When trafficking with men,' Nietzsche once wrote, 'we often need to practice a benevolent dissimulation; we have to pretend we do not see through the motives of their actions.' But [...]

Six. This is the number of consecutive subject-verb-object sentences with which Alain de Botton begins his most recent novel, The Course of Love. It's the writer's way of signaling to [...]

I am going to steal this sentence. This is my first thought after reading the opening line to Lawrence Durrell's Justine, the first installment of the author's Alexandria Quartet. 'The [...]

A lot of public signage in Israel has both Hebrew and Arabic, but Israeli typographer Liron Lavi Turkenich has decided to explore the relationship between these two languages even further. [...]

Cadillac caused a stir this week when a casting service put out a request on behalf of the American luxury brand looking to fill the role of an 'alt-right (neo-Nazi)' [...]

What happens after the credits? Do Rick and Louie remain friends? Does Sam keep playing songs in the Casablanca bar after the Germans are gone? Do Matt Damon and Ben [...]