One night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact ...

A person once said to me, “You’re a writer. You must have a lot to say.” He was making an assumption. I’ve thought about his assumption many times. Is it that simple? Do I write because I have a lot ...

How a band of island nations became Israel’s staunchest defenders ...

Tuesday, June 6. I turned on the radio for the eight a.m. news. The announcer spoke about special warnings which had been broadcast to our Allies in Western Europe. There was even a mention of German ...

I went to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005 because I’d won a writing prize, and with that prize came an invitation to a luncheon and awards ceremony. Each honoree was allowed to bring ...

As a small child, I would sometimes sit with my parents in our suburban London living room and watch the six o’clock news on the BBC. One evening, I saw… ...

From the Forum “Undoing Bush” It has always been the case that failed wars damage armies and sometimes break them. So it is with Iraq, unless remedies intervene soon enough.… ...

In the fall of 2014, I attended a public dialogue on “Revolution and Religion” between Bob Avakian, chairman and cofounder of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and Cornel West, professor of ...

From “An Army of One’s Own,” which appeared in the February 1997 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 174 ...

From Liontaming in America, which was published last month by New Directions. I was reaching for a passage to the world they came from, the bodies slowly turning into the… ...

From his introduction to a new edition of Fear and Loathing in America, by Hunter S. Thompson, which was published this spring by Simon & Schuster. In 1971, when I… ...

Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, by Alexander Nemerov. Penguin Press. 288 pages. $28. Imagine, if you will, that it’s the year 1990, and you are flipping through the magazine Art ...