From the 2008 season. Michael meets Adam at university. Gets invited for a weekend at the family estate, Egypt Farm. There he encounters the entire eccentric Hanbury clan—rustic, peculiar, utterly unforgettable...

I've got a soft spot for Georges Perec. He worked as a documentarian—same field I trained in. My class chose him as our patron. But mostly, I love how he and the Oulipo crew proved what language could do when you bent it into impossible shapes...

Who hasn't stood in front of contemporary art and thought: is this genius or a scam? This essay tackles that exact question. Includes bonus texts on the novel and art's relationship with time. From the 2008 season...

William Gasper lives alone in a shipping container behind a gas station in Nevada. Lives—that's generous. He's rarely there. "My calling," he says, "is walking." And walk he does...

French lit: Son absence by Justine Augier, Le rêve de Machiavel by Christophe Bataille, Des néons sous la mer by Frédéric Ciriez, Ce que nous avons eu de meilleur by Jean-Paul Enthoven, and more...

"Like long echoes mingling from afar / In a dark and profound unity, / Vast as the night and as the light, / Perfumes, colors, and sounds correspond." Baudelaire knew. My recent reading keeps circling back to this idea...

Ariane flunked out of science, became a photographer instead. Through work she meets Gabriel Barthomieux—famous botanist obsessed with deserts. They become friends. The older man, the younger woman, both drawn to emptiness...

Sonia's thirteen, lives in Nice, spends way too much time at her grandmother Baboutchka's place. It suffocates her—the old ladies gossiping in Russian over the samovar, the heavy curtains, the past hanging thick in every room...

"Our country, you see, in its glory days when it was the richest nation on earth, was like a zoo. Clean, well-kept, orderly. Everyone in their place and happy. Goldsmiths here, cowherds there..." India through the eyes of a servant turned entrepreneur...

Matilda lives on a Pacific island, paradise incarnate—until war breaks out. Soldiers invade, locals call them Redskins. All the white people flee. Except one...