CATEGORIES

The Thimble

Pashka Bystrov, known around the village as Speedy, was leaning back against the warm stove and despondently watching his wife, Galka. Her hair still in curlers, she was tossing her dresses, skirts, and fleece tights into a suitcase, wadding up her feather-light stockings, and yelling at him that she was sick up to here, and then some, with village life, and she wanted to hear her heels tapping on asphalt and get a proper salon perm.

“Painting Jesus Isn't Dangerous”

Orthodox Street Art in Contemporary Russia

Journeys through the Russian Empire

WILLIAM CRAFT BRUMFIELD Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky traveled throughout Russia prior to the Revolution, photographing churches and mosques, railways and monasteries, towns and remote natural landscapes. His images are now archived at the Library of Congress. William Brumfield has recreated Prokudin-Gorsky’s journeys and photographed those same sites today and the photos are laid out side by side int his new book – a testament to two brilliant photographers whose work prompts and illuminates, monument by monument, questions of conservation, restoration, and cultural identity and memory.

Owls of the Eastern Ice

A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl

Arctic Wake-up Call

Oil spill highlights Russia's deteriorating infrastructure

An expat Goes Home

At dawn one day in late November, I was awakened by a call. It was my niece, sobbing: “Uncle Vic… Papa died.”

A Cold Soup to Beet Summer

I was a picky eater in my childhood, and cooked vegetables were especially taboo for me, precluding any enjoyment of my mother’s scrumptious borshch, vegetable ragout, and the like. It must have been a small miracle for her, then, that I did eat her cold svekolnik (свекольник) soup. Perhaps I was seduced by its brilliant red color, or by the floating halves of a hard-boiled egg, or the fact that it was refreshingly cold on a hot summer day.

Kevin Kwan – The Shakespeare of Status Anxiety

Kevin Kwan, the author of Crazy Rich Asians, celebrates and skewers the social codes of the wealthy and powerful.

A Sylk Road Renaissance

Excavations in Tajikistan have unveiled a city of merchant princes that flourished from the fifth to the eighth century A.D.

The Arrow That Saved My Life—Twice

After a freak backyard accident almost kills her, a Texas woman is taken on a miraculous medical journey

First Fiction 2020

In our twentieth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, Lauren Groff, Bryan Washington, Paul Lisicky, Sue Monk Kidd, and Sarah Gailey introduce first books by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, Jean Kyoung Frazier, Corinne Manning, Megha Majumdar, and John Fram.

A Poetics Of Resilience

In her new book, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, former poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize Winner Natasha Trethewy contends with persistent trauma, both personal and cultural, going beyond witnessing to seek truth in all its complexity.

What We Found in Writing

ON THE evening Denver went into lockdown, I was fishing. The South Platte runs right through the city, and if you’re into urban fly-fishing, you can cast for huge carp among the wrecked grocery carts and old tires.

Save Indie Bookstores

Writers tend to have their favorite local book-stores. The one where the staff members are mostly poets.

“I Said to My Mother, ‘Did You See the Blood?' She Said, ‘I Hoped You Hadn't Noticed.'”

Marga Griesbach was sent to Stutthof concentration camp in 1944. This past February, she left Washington State to take a cruise around the world.

The Last Night Out

The virus pulled back the curtain on our fraught relationships.

What Takes Our Breath Away

An undertaker reflects on the one thing death can’t steal: our stories.

The Special Child

In his unsettling trilogy about a possibly divine boy, J. M. Coetzee asks how we recognize the truth when it enters the world.

Food & Drink

Babushka’s Victory Cake

Under Review

Under Review

The Secret of Scooby-Doo's Enduring Appeal

Why on earth has the formulaic series, which debuted half a century ago, outlasted just about everything else on television?

The Beauties

I. I remember when I was still in high school in the fifth or sixth level, I traveled with my grandfather from the village of Bolshaya Krepkaya in the Don region to Rostov-on Don.

Petrov Goes Back to School

The Sheshurino school was shut down on the very cusp of the New Year.

Russian Chronicles

The Case Against Foreign Lit

A Village School

Paganism is alive and well here in the Mari El Republic.

Northern Wood Saving Forgotten Churches

Just before sunset, a large, modern bus stopped in the quiet village of Saminsky Pogost. About three dozen women (along with a nun and several men) stepped out onto the dusty, sandy road.

The Patty Shop

Jolting along mud-choked roads, sending up spurts of brownish ooze, the district bus is clambering up and down the humpbacked hillocks.

Space Dogs

The canine cosmonauts of the soviet space program

The End Of The World*

In the summer of 2010, on the island of Bolshoy Zhuzhmuy in the White Sea, the shortwave radio crackled.

Errol Morris Is Fascinated by and Terrified of Steve Bannon

The decorated filmmaker didn’t expect the dramatic reaction to his “toxic” documentary about Trump’s former aide-de-camp.