The building was frustrating. Was that because the person who lived in it was?

As soon as Farley’s collar was unhooked, he took the nearest, steepest slope down into the dell. By the time he reached the bottom, he was fishtailing a little, his looser back legs having descended slightly faster than his front ones. He fetched up between a black Lab mix named Scout and Scout’s owner. To get between a rival dog and its owner was strategy. Cut off the opposing army from its supply.

“Seen anything good?” Scout’s owner asked.

Jacob was in the habit of bringing his camera to the park, and it was around his neck. “A wasp’s nest, but it’s too high. Did you start that job at the hospital?”

As soon as I said I was thirty, I wondered why I had said it. “Thirty,” said the woman I was talking to, who had a tousled gamine haircut, dyed white as only a very young woman will risk.

“The coincidental resonance/overlap with my own short story was eerie.”

We’re out until January 5, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2014 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year!Early in Darren Aronofsky’s new movie, Noah, the title character, played by Russell Crowe, comes acr…

Early in Darren Aronofsky’s new movie, Noah, the title character, played by Russell Crowe, comes across an antediluvian beastie, a cross between a dog and an armadillo. The beastie snarls because there’s a broken-off assegai tip in its flank, but…

A non-question has recently preoccupied the literary corners of the Internet: How rude should a book critic be? I call it a non-question because its non-answer is the same as for people in social situations generally: it depends. It’s impossible …

Elizabeth Bishop was a painter as well as a poet, and the paintings that she left to her partner Alice Methfessel, who died in 2009, are now being sold. I’ve been to see the paintings a couple of times: last winter in the office of James S. Jaffe R…

We’re out this week, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2011 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year!My husband and I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) the other night. He’d never seen it before, to …

“Moments are the elements of profit,” Karl Marx wrote in Capital, quoting from an 1860 report by one of the British government’s factory inspectors. Marx believed that the uniformity of time underlay the fungibility of money; the time it took to ma…

Probably no writer ever finishes a book without wishing he could keep it to himself. For one thing, a book is company, during the writing of it; it’s hard to accept its departure. For another, a book is never free of flaws, its author being human. …

“Pretty grim here,” a girl in Steven Soderbergh’s new movie, Contagion, texts to a friend from a funeral home, where the director is explaining to her father that he’s refusing to accept the infected corpses of her mother and brother. Lethal epidem…

  What's Christopher Nolan’s new movie Inception about? As a piece of science fiction, Inception sets forth its own laws governing the nature of dreams, and dreams in the movie conform to the movie's laws, not those uncovered by Sigmund Freud in…

Why Splice isn't science fiction. Splice, an indie thriller directed by Vincenzo Natali, has been marketed as an updated tale of Frankenstein's monster. Indeed, in Frankenstein's tradition, Splice's heroic couple, Clive (played by Adrien Brody) an…