Strange Fascination
October 14
Werner Herzog’s quest for ecstatic truth
William Giraldi
William Giraldi is the author of the novels Busy Monsters, Hold the Dark, and About Face, the memoir The Hero’s Body, and a collection of criticism, American Audacity. A new memoir, Pure Jersey, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. He is a Guggenehim Fellow and teaches at Boston University.
A Place of Wounds
April 17, 2025
Being an American, Henry James knew, is “a complex fate.”
Miraculous Feelings
The exclamation “You’re obsessed,” no matter how it’s uttered, amounts to a layman’s diagnosis or charge, a way of saying something’s wrong with you, and thus a spur to recognition and betterment by the one exclaiming, since the knee-jerk assumption is always that ...
The Baleful and the Brightest
April 10, 2017
If you want to know what the good Lord thinks of your earthly strivings, you’ll find it in this note to Isaiah 39, in the Geneva Bible: “How greatly God detesteth ambition and vaine glory.” Pretty straightforward. What was a vice for Romans became a sin for Christians. ...
Victor Serge, The Unconquered
May 25, 2015
Some writers are destined to have two deaths—the first in life, and the second in memory. The lucky ones can be resurrected from that second death by cultural circumstance and the aid of overseeing angels, irked by injustice, believing these Lazaruses should be helped from ...
This Brat’s for You
Sometime in 2011, before the gestation of my second son, my employer, Boston University, implemented paternity leave for its male professors. A colleague informed me of this news with much envy and astonishment: his four young children had been born before BU joined the ...