In Han Kang’s latest novel, a character saws off the tips of two of her fingers in a woodworking accident. Surgeons reattach them but the treatment is gruesome and agonizing. Every three minutes, for weeks on end, a caregiver carefully, dispassionately sinks needles deep into the sutures on each finger, drawing blood, to prevent the […]

One sector that most publishers in Africa say is rapidly growing is children’s books. Lola Shoneyin, a novelist and the publisher of Ouida Books in Nigeria, is leading a project to train writers, agents, illustrators, editors and graphic designers on the publication of children’s books. The project, known as BookStorm, was born from a trip […]

“I like punctuality, it’s a virtue I have learned to appreciate,” Pope Francis writes in the fifth chapter of his autobiography, to be published on Tuesday in 18 languages, adding that he considers it “a sign of good manners and respect, to arrive promptly.” Unfortunately, as a newborn, Francis writes, he arrived a week late, […]

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. In 1977, Karen Wynn Fonstad made a long shot cold call to J.R.R. Tolkien’s American publisher with the hope of landing a dream assignment: to create an exhaustive atlas of Middle-earth, the […]

The Harvard Sentences are hundreds of sentences that have been used for many decades to test technologies in which understanding speech is essential, like telephone systems and hearing aids. I came across the list recently and was charmed by it. Some sample sentences: It’s easy to tell the depth of a well. The hogs were […]

In early 1988, the British neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick found himself drowning in letters from people who believed they had survived an encounter with death. “I slowly floated down a tunnel, not afraid in any way but looking forward to something,” one man wrote to him. “When it came I was absolutely at peace and going […]

In the trilogy’s second book, “Small World” (1984), Morris Zapp, a slick theoretician delivering a lecture at a conference, uses the striptease style supposedly popular in the all-nude go-go bars of Berkeley, Calif., as a metaphor for what continental theory has uncovered about language: “This is not striptease, it is all strip and no tease, […]