Russian Metamorphoses
Teffi was so adored in prerevolutionary Russia that a chocolate candy was named after her, with her pretty face on its brightly colored wrapper. She was...
The Rules of the Confidence Game
In the early thirteenth century a column of light blazed from the top of a shaykh’s head when he walked home at night. It lit up...
A Snob’s Progress
“I am very fond of Chips,” the London society hostess Maud Cunard declared in 1926, “and so is everyone else.” “I seem,” Chips himself remarked a...
‘Lost, at Sea, at Odds’
Another language, another soul. In her first book written in Italian, In altre parole (In Other Words, translated by Ann Goldstein), Jhumpa Lahiri explains how she...
The Wrong Culprit
To the Editors: In her lively, wide-ranging, and learned review of Vaughn Scribner’s Merpeople: A Human History [NYR, March 25], Marina Warner states that “Proteus, whom...
Trauma Has Forced Me to Become a Powerful Witch
In the introductory essay of White Magic, Elissa Washuta—a Native American author and member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe—examines the colonization of spirituality, as well as...
7 Books That Will Make You Think About Motherhood in New Ways
When I was thinking of pursuing single motherhood, I sought out books—fiction and nonfiction—about motherhood and parenting. What I ran into, again and again, were variations...
6 Personal Narrative Examples Every Aspiring Essayist Should Read
If writing a personal essay came with a step-by-step guide — and sadly, it doesn’t — the first step would be to read really good essays....
This Story Sucks: What I Learned Teaching LGBTQ Studies
On my classroom’s back wall, cartoon unicorns distinguish gender from sex and sexuality. Lil Nas X muses on the success of “Old Town Road:” “wow man...
