ARTICLES
Last Rites and Comic Flights
A funeral in a 1984 Japanese film offers moments of slapstick amid the solemnity
By Pico Iyer
Polish Lessons
Four decades ago, a young American found himself in Warsaw during turbulent, extraordinary times
By Thomas Swick
A Remembrance of Places Both Empty and Full
The divine, stark photographs of Robert Adams
By Megan Craig
Last Rites and Comic Flights
A funeral in a 1984 Japanese film offers moments of slapstick amid the solemnity
By Pico Iyer
Polish Lessons
Four decades ago, a young American found himself in Warsaw during turbulent, extraordinary times
By Thomas Swick
A Remembrance of Places Both Empty and Full
The divine, stark photographs of Robert Adams
By Megan Craig
It Happened One Day in June
Why Ulysses is as vital as ever— compelling, complex, and direct
By Robert J. Seidman
For the Joy of Joyce
Abandon the notion of high-minded seriousness and simply enter into the novel’s flow
By Amit Chaudhuri
The Bomb Next Door
Eighty years into the atomic age, U.S. nuclear power reactors have produced several million tons of radioactive waste—and we still have no idea how to dispose of it
By Thomas A. Bass
DEPARTMENTS
editor's note
tuning up
When ‘All-Inclusive’ Is Anything But
What’s to become of a modest, beloved vacation retreat?
By Miranda Weiss
poetry
Stanzas From a Locked-Down World
Form, fragment, and memory in the lyrics of Terrance Hayes
By Langdon Hammer
fiction
commonplace book
Book essay
She Was the Toast of the World
The dramas and diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay
By Sandra M. Gilbert
book reviews
Morals, Meaning, and Nonsense
Ethical inquiry requires lived experience, not just logical examination
By Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Different People, Different Stories
On the complexities of lumping psychiatric patients into categories
By Kathryn Tabb
More Than a ‘Mere Echo’
English versions of foreign literature must stand on their own
By Lauren Elkin
What a Long, Strange Trip It Was
The explosive writer who created worlds alien and mundane
By Madison Smartt Bell
A Whale of a Story
The parallel lives of Moby-Dick’s creator and the historian who rescued him from obscurity
By Steven G. Kellman
California Scheming
Has one of the 20th century’s greatest unsolved crimes finally been cracked?