The End is what I call a CD painting, a reverse-glass painting I painted on plexiglass to obscure part of an image from the cover of Mariah Carey’s Rainbow. I probably shouldn’t go on too much about ...

Graphic designers and proofreaders—and the businesses and governments they work for—usually succeed at eliminating errors in ...

On a low-pollution Sunday last December, the weekend before Christmas, I headed to People’s Park on Shanghai’s Nanjing Road to visit the city’s so-called marriage market: a cluster of footpaths and ...

A big part of the problem was that, obviously, I had a situation, but I did not have a story. And I had a character whose perspective I often wrote through, but I didn’t think she was a protagonist.

“I had come to Poland to seek out the story of Count Rzewuski and other Polish adventurers who had traveled from the Ukrainian farmlands and Russian steppes south to the Levant and the Arabian ...

Over a period of several years in the early seventeenth century, there appeared in Western Europe three manifestos laying out the history of the theretofore unheard-of Rosicrucian order, whose secret ...

The white lines on the dirt football field were fresh, but by halftime they would be barely visible. It was homecoming weekend in Trona, an isolated community established in 1912 as a company town for ...

After eight glorious weeks of freedom, I got rehired. First thing I did was walk over to the machine shop to look for my F-150. The oil stain was there but the truck wasn’t. It wasn’t in the rock lot ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...

The mind is always too simply seeking meaning, trying to boil some beautiful thing down to its conceptual essence. What can stun the mind into quietness? What can briefly flummox the mind in its quest ...

I tend not to think that stuff other people think is obvious is obvious. Everyone feels like they have some sense of Frost. Everyone knows a poem or two. That kind of overexposure lends an aspect of ...

Usually, institutional libraries are governed by highly codified policies. Their catalogues are their raison d’être, elegant data structures that facilitate easy circulation and millennial continuity.