“Tell me, my daughters,” says King Lear, announcing his intention to divest himself “of rule… [and] territory,” of “cares of state,” as he points to a map of his kingdom spread out before him. “Which of you shall we say doth love us most / That we our largest bounty may extend?” In attempting to take love’s measure, to size it up and apportion its...

Is Salman Rushdie an artist or a symbol? Can he be one but not the other? Or perhaps it’s an all-or-nothing affair and he is both or else neither. Ever since Rushdie, the author of 13 novels, was violently attacked onstage in August 2022 at a literary event, one line of thinking has it that his books should perforce be celebrated. The New Yorker embodied...

Death is one of the great literary subjects. It is also an essential narrative device, at once extreme and quotidian. How many stories hinge on either the escape from death or a fate worse than death? And when there is nothing left to happen, characters die. Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, subjected to every possible humiliation and degradation after his metamorphosis,...

Early in First Love: Essays on Friendship, Lilly Dancyger writes about her fire escape, a precarious perch off an old East Village apartment where she and her friends would gather: “Literally stepping out of our lives, to drink and smoke and commiserate.” It becomes a perfect metaphor for the refuge found in friendship, for the ways we hold and make...

Paul Auster died on April 30 after being the voice in my ear for a month. I had only recently finished his massive novel 4321, using an approach I learned from my wife to preserve momentum on very long books. (It is almost 1,100 pages.) By taking up an audiobook alongside a physical volume and alternating between the two as circumstances require, the...

The region, we’re told, extends from the deserts of Sonora to the straits of Tierra del Fuego, encompassing 7.7 million square miles that are home to 660 million people who share two Latinate languages: Spanish and Portuguese. What complicates the picture is that many in that vast expanse also speak Nahuatl, Quechua, and hundreds of other tongues. But...