Reading the world from my New York City apartment

After spending last week immersed in Wall Street’s 1929 crash, I’m now rewinding three years and shifting continents to meet a group of Russian émigrés in Berlin. One of my literary through lines this year is to explore books written or set in 1926. I started with The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, followed by Jazz by Toni Morrison. My latest pick is Mary, Vladimir Nabokov’s first novel. It’s a beautifully written and poignant book about a young man consumed with memori

One of the best nonfiction books I’ve read is Too Big to Fail, a moment-by-moment reconstruction of the 2008 financial crisis by New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin. I was also a journalist during those frenetic days and was frankly envious of Sorkin’s extraordinary access to key figures that gave him a fly-on-the-wall view of how the U.S. economy nearly collapsed. I therefore had pretty high expectations for 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History – And

I’ve been writing recently about books inspired by the moon. In Albert Camus’s The Stranger, it’s the scorching sun that drives the senseless murder at the center of the plot. This existential novella completes my trio of posts on the theme of regret, and it’s a big departure from the first two. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Ernest Hemingway recounts the death-bed regrets of a writer who abandoned his literary talent, while in “Feathers,” Raymond Carver explores a more naggi

After writing last week about the bitter feelings of regret that permeate Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I found myself wanting to explore this emotion from a different angle. My choice this week is "Feathers” by Raymond Carver, a story that is both odd and deeply moving. "Feathers” opens Carver's 1983 collection Cathedral. I have had this book for years and have read some of the stories, but I had never read this one until now. Carver, a master of the short s

I’m a latecomer to The White Lotus, but I’ve now devoured the first two seasons. It’s cleverly plotted, smartly written and the locales (Hawaii in Season 1, and Sicily in Season 2) are gorgeous. This TV series has also sent me back, unexpectedly, to thinking about Ernest Hemingway. Each season of The White Lotus follows a group of wealthy guests at a luxury resort who both lose and reveal themselves while on vacation. By the end of the trip, someone also ends up dead. I'm war

Before discussing this book, let’s take a short detour into the nuances of grammar. I promise this is going somewhere. In English, there is an important difference between “a,” an indefinite article, and “the,” which is definite. “A giraffe” could refer to any of the long-necked, spotted animals, while “the giraffe” indicates a specific one. When you stack together multiple articles and nouns, the shades of meaning can get murkier. In essayist Janet Malcolm’s famous takedown