Daniel Kolitz, author of “The Goon Squad,” on the grotesque, his inventive journalistic approach, and the psychic toll of spending too much time in the GoonVerse.

Requiem, Op. 59, by Arnold Rosner. Toccata Classics. $18.99. In the spring of 1970, I was about to enter the Manhattan School of Music to pursue the study of musicology. At the time, I was working at ...

Franz Kafka was a skinny fellow; he claimed he was the thinnest person he knew. As a young man, he deliberately developed a facial tic. He sometimes felt he didn’t really exist, or if he did, only in ...

Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...

The notion of the “nostalgic American” served liberals as an ideal whipping boy at a time when the intellectual foundations of liberalism were beginning to erode. As the dogma of progress became ...

From Liberalism and Its Discontents, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Modern democracies are facing a deep cognitive crisis. For many years now, societies have been ...

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the ...

Democracy, English, and the wars over usage ...

When Utinan Won was twelve, he liked to sprawl out on the floor of his living room and read manga. His favorite series was Naruto, the story of a lonely orphan. Naruto, who also happens to be twelve, ...

David Foster Wallace was a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine. Wallace’s work first appeared in the September 1989 issue of the magazine with the story “Everything Is Green,” from Girl with ...

After the tumult of the 2008 financial crisis, the investor Bill Gross, known as “The Bond King,” was ill at ease. He’d bet on the government and against the housing market. In doing so, he made a ...