Summer has faded away, though warm days still linger, and I find myself marking how fresh figs, peaches, plums and nectarines vanish from the market. Of these I miss figs the most, their season is so short, and the dried version of a fig is such an inadequate substitute—it’s almost a slur on the original. [...]

The vast majority of the world in which we live is invisible, I believe. Every object around us was initially conceived and shaped by an unseen complex of synaptic connections in someone’s mind, and nearly every conversation we conduct is guided not so much by the words we speak but by the vast stretch of [...]

When the celebrated film editor Walter Murch was working on the movie adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he would receive dailies from the director, Phil Kaufman, every two weeks. Murch made a series of photographic stills from the various filmed scenes sent him, in an attempt to locate what he [...]

A favorite among the books I’ve read this summer is the novel The Solitude of Prime Numbers, by Paolo Giordano. The narrative follows the entwining lives of an Italian girl and boy, Alice and Mattia, from childhoods marked by unexpected trauma to the unfolding consequences of those events into their early adulthood. Through their separate [...]

With my second cataract operation behind me, I’m amazed at how much my sight has improved (and I’m also adjusting to my new cyborg self, now that I host a plastic lens in each eye). For a while, though, I found it difficult to read, with most texts looking like this unless I closed one [...]

Now that I’m recovering from cataract surgery, I find that I can’t read for more than short stretches of time, and I’m reminded of how essential to my day are the acts of reading and writing. I’m the sort of person who carries a book along wherever I go, on the chance that I’ll find [...]

When I was a college student I used to work as a cab driver in New York City. My first week on the job was a disastrous time. Every single cab I’d been assigned had broken down: the first night, a tire blew out; the second, the engine overheated, steam rising from under the hood [...]

Blinded by an accident when he was six years old, the French memoirist Jacques Lusseyran learned to prefer his blind life over his previous sighted experience. “I no longer saw faces, and knew in all probability I should go through life without seeing them,” he wrote of those early sightless days, in his book And [...]

We all know just how messy it is to write, how much guessing, and chance, and simple due diligence through an intractable problem will get us to where we need to go. But through all the joyful and painful mess of creation, structure somehow does get its say. Patterns do begin to emerge, and it’s [...]

I read, and read obsessively, in search of transformation, of following any author’s eyes to a new angle on the world–for me, that’s entertainment. One author who does this consistently is Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist who won the 2005 Man Booker International Prize and is year after year shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in [...]