Photograph of basalt by Marek Novotňák. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The first big influence on my writing was Nathaniel Hawthorne. My teacher in senior year of high school had written her doctoral thesis on The Marble Faun, if you can imagine that—and she was a nun! I went to one of the bookstores on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan...

Watchers by Bradford Johnson. From Painting Past Photographs, a portfolio that appeared in The Paris Review issue no. 168 (Winter 2003). “Every night the same nightmare interrupts my sleep.” With this sentence Scholastique Mukasonga begins her debut Cockroaches, a memoir that came out in French in 2006. That year, Mukasonga was fifty. She had been...

Map of Richard Kandt’s expedition to find the source of the Nile. From Caput Nili by Richard Kandt. Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I was born on the banks of the Rukarara, but I have no memory of it. My memories come from my mother. The Rukarara flows in my imagination and my dreams. I was just a few months old when my family left its...

  Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often, we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We often share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share...

Hannah Arendt, 1958. Photograph by Barbara Niggl Radloff. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Fotografie. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. For a while there in the late nineties, it seemed to me like every other book of poetry that I flipped open in the bookstore was prefaced by an austere epigraph from the writings of Ludwig...

Photograph by J. D. Daniels. Let me begin by insisting that I learned nothing. What is left of it now, my electronics project, other than the names of these things? A solderless breadboard, and another one, and another one. A fifty-foot roll of twenty-seven-gauge insulated copper wire. Tactile switch micro assortment momentary tact assortment kit,...