When I visit other countries, I always try to seek out a bookstore. My purchases are usually but not always tied to the place. Years ago in London, I discovered Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, while in Amsterdam I bought a copy of the sci-fi novel The Book of Strange New Things by Dutch-born writer Michel Faber, and in New Zealand, I found An Angel at My Table, an autobiography by one of that country's most famous writers, Janet Frame. On my vacation to Sweden last summer, I

A few months ago, I wrote about my happy discovery of the first installment in the planned seven-book series On the Calculation of Volume. This inventive novel explores the idea of being trapped in time, living the same day over and over. What especially piqued my interest is that this ceaseless day – November 18th – also happens to be my birthday. On the Calculation of Volume, written by Danish author Solvej Balle and beautifully translated by Barbara Haveland, is hard to ca

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Vladimir Nabokov’s century-old novel Mary and the futility of trying to relive the past. I didn’t plan for this next book to cover similar ground, but the obsession with memory also underpins Brit Bennett’s The Mothers, a contemporary novel set in Southern California. Both stories hinge on a teenage love affair that echoes into adulthood. In each book, it’s clear that the past cannot be recreated. Yet The Mothers, published in 2016, is alt

The World Cup is a big event in my household, and it’s particularly exciting to see it unfold on our home turf. Besides watching a lot of soccer these last few weeks, I’ve also spent far too much time scrolling through Instagram videos from tourists, Europeans mostly, who have come to support their teams and fallen in love with America along the way. These visitors have been documenting their delight and astonishment over many things Americans take for granted: central air co

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

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

There are a hundred ways to choose a book. Reviews, recommendations, or maybe you just like the picture on the cover. I've been known to seek out books after spotting other people reading them on the subway. But this is the first time I've picked up a book because its plot is centered on my birthday. In Book One of On the Calculation of Volume by Danish novelist Solvej Balle, antiquarian bookseller Tara Selter has somehow become trapped living the same day on an endless loop

Last week, I wrote about the universal pull of moon stories in the wake of the Artemis II lunar mission. Now, on to the book I read recently that put me in a celestial frame of mind: John Steinbeck's World War II novella, The Moon Is Down . I only came across this Steinbeck book recently and decided to read it because I was intrigued by the title. It comes from a chilling scene in Macbeth , when Fleance warns that "the moon is down" just before Macbeth murders King Duncan. Fo

Raise your hand if you slogged through The Scarlet Letter in high school. I distinctly remember how much hate this book elicited from my 11th-grade English class. Secretly though, I kind of loved Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale of sin, hypocrisy and guilt among the Puritans. Still, I never returned to Hawthorne until just now, when I decided to read The Marble Faun, his final completed novel. The book centers on a group of young expatriate artists in 19th-century Rome who become e

A company in South Korea made headlines last year when it announced it would award employees 100 million won (about $75,000) for every baby that they have. It's part of an effort to reverse the country’s low birth rate, which has been fueled by high living costs, a grinding work culture, and the growing sentiment among many young women that marriage isn't worth the hassle. In the short and sly novel Apartment Women, first published in Korean in 2018 and translated into Englis

Literature is full of characters who find their way to New York to remake themselves, from Jay Gatsby to Holly Golightly. In Toni Morrison's 1992 novel Jazz, Joe and Violet Trace arrive in Harlem during the Great Migration with hopes of moving past the violence and indignities of the rural South, only to find that the city offers no escape. I just finished reading Jazz and found it to be dazzling and thought-provoking, just like every other Toni Morrison novel I have read. I

I'm very interested in learning more about the Vietnam War, and in better understanding both how the United States got entangled in the conflict and what has happened in the decades since we withdrew. Today, Vietnam has transformed into one of the most dynamic economies in Asia. I also hear that it's an amazing place to visit. One book that came highly recommended is The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam, and I already have a copy sitting on my bookshelf. It is wide

I read a wild article in The Wall Street Journal recently about an artificial intelligence tool called Moltbot that creates agents to handle day-to-day tasks autonomously, like booking dinner reservations and sifting through your inbox. But it hasn't taken long for these AI assistants to go beyond their original remit: they have forged a community among themselves in which they engage in dark, dystopian chatter. They have concocted their own religion and call humans dumb. A

I almost did a double take when I read that the new film adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is being released this weekend to coincide with Valentine's Day. Seriously? This book is many things — brilliant, intense and unforgettable — but a date-night romance it is not. At least not in any traditional sense. For many years, I put off reading this book, but I finally tackled it during the pandemic when I had more time to read. I don't know what took me so long.

Ernest Hemingway famously used the term "the iceberg theory" to describe his writing technique, in which only a small part of his meaning is visible, and the rest is submerged. Reading his work today, it's easy to forget how experimental his approach was at the time. I underlined the following passage because I think it encapsulates Hemingway's mastery of understatement, as well as his flair for pointing out the absurd in subtle ways. This paragraph appears toward the end of

In 1926, Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises, his first novel. To mark its 100th anniversary, it felt fitting to re-read the book and to reflect on why I think it's an American masterpiece. The first time I encountered this book was in my AP English class in high school. I was instantly hooked on Hemingway's style and his Prohibition-era tale of American and British expats behaving badly as they gallivanted through Europe. At the same time, I didn't really get a lot

Ever since I read The Hebrew Teacher, the first book translated into English by the US-based, Israeli-born writer Maya Arad, I have been eagerly anticipating the publication of her next book in English. The Hebrew Teacher is a collection of three novellas, all centered around Israeli transplants in America and the complicated bonds they have with one another and their homeland. The title story takes place at a college in the Midwest, and the other two are set in Northern Cali