This is America, I thought, it isn’t right to deny an adult—a paying customer—a beer.” ...

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 ...

“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 ...

Over a morning cappuccino in a small but lively European café that spilled onto the central square of a town near the sea, I first read “The Country Husband,” my introduction to John Cheever, on a ...

This year, we asked our contributors, our readers, our current and former interns, and other friends of the Review for their favorite books of the past year. Here’s what they said. Service by John ...

Just as the sun begins to peek over the flat horizon of Coon Rapids, Iowa, 1,383 pigeons fill the sky. The birds pour out as a single winged mass from the rows of flung-open coops on the transport ...

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 ...

Halfway through her 1981 autobiographical novel, Baby Driver, the story of her hectic, careening life as a young bohemian woman traveling through North and South America in the sixties and seventies, ...

My new job came with a research stipend. I’d never had one before—a few grand that would renew each year for five years and then end. What could I use it for? “Anything,” I was told, which seemed ...

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, ...