The current issue of The Paris Review has a scoop to rival a sit-down with Pynchon: The first in-person interview with Elena Ferrante, in which the notoriously reclusive author explains her anonymity: “This demand for self-promotion diminishes the actual work of art,” she says. “The media simply can’t discuss a work of literature without pointing …
The Bazaar and the Monastery, or Being on Book Tour Read More »
NB: Solicited and then gently unhanded by The New York Times Magazine for reasons too convoluted to get into! + My father and I are so alike-looking that cashiers turning to us in a checkout line always know we’re together. The list of other convergences is too brief: He showed me a great deal of …
In 1988, when my family declared its desire to emigrate, our homeland imposed a brutal discouragement: No person could leave with more than several hundred dollars’ worth of possessions on hand. (What would you take? My mother tried to bring her wedding ring, but it was seized at customs.) In the Soviet Union, we were …
A young novelist explores the anxieties of influence It’s very hard to persuade a friend watching the clock in an office in Midtown Manhattan that at your artist colony in southeastern Wyoming, you — who are eating food made by a country-club chef, sleeping in a free bed, writing in a handsome studio, and taking …
What Gabriel Garcia Marquez taught me It is a well-known fact that young men under 18 embrace literature primarily to impress the girls they are trying to seduce. You had to congratulate my ambition: A Soviet-Jewish immigrant kid with funny hair and funnier clothes after an American-born, Catholic, Colombian beauty whom I’ll call C. But …
Falling in love, falling out of love, and finding something greater than both We met cute, real-life edition: Three years older, she was in the exit lane of a failing young marriage, and, being 24, I was struggling to distinguish my rear end from my elbow. I was moderating a talk uptown, and she was …
A 24-year-old Jewish Upper West Sider helps run the most important Arab-American organization in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, home to 35,000 Arabs.
The last time we had been in this part of Europe together was 23 years before, when we arrived in Italy as stateless refugees.
It started in the summer of 2008. The Multnomah County library in Portland, Ore., wanted me to return its Russian translation of Stephen Hunter’s thriller “Dirty White Boys.”
My family, refugees from the Soviet Union, arrived in the United States on Thanksgiving Eve 1988. This year, I celebrated the holiday a mile from the spot where the Pilgrims first touched American soil, 368 years and two days before my family landed at JFK.