For the New York Times Bookends column, Rivka Galchen walks us through a deceptively simple poem by Zbigniew Herbert to illustrate a philosophy that supports both the abstract and the moral responsibility…
Sahota takes it further in “The Year of the Runaways”: “What decadence this belonging rubbish was, what time the rich must have if they could sit around and weave great…
At the New York Times, Alice Gregory and Pankaj Mishra discuss the role of moralism in the novel—and conclude that authors should seek to question and provoke rather than preach: Not…
When an artist has to assert that her intended audience is all humans rather than those who happen to be of her particular gender or race, what she’s actually having…
Critics have been locked in debate over the Internet’s effect on cultural production and reception for as long as most millennials can remember, exclamations like “democratized content” and “death of…
Pankaj Mishra has always been a politically outspoken writer, so when Mo Yan, who has defended the Chinese government’s censorship, won the Nobel Prize, Mishra was the last person anyone…
Is it true that nowadays nonfiction is more relevant than fiction? Pankaj Mishra and Rivka Galchen answer the question and both their answers are dissimilar. Mishra answers, “Even writers working…