Harper's Magazine

3 weeks ago | harpers.org | John MacArthur

A version of this column originally ran in Le Devoir on April 7, 2025. Translated from the French by Elettra Pauletto. I tend to avoid clichéd, simplistic comparisons to the 1938 Munich Agreement and Britain’s disastrous appeasement of Adolf Hitler.

1 month ago | harpers.org | Nicholas Dames

Discussed in this essay: The Deserters, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New Directions. 192 pages. $16.95. Mathias Énard’s The Deserters, his twelfth novel and sixth to be translated into English, bears the marks of its own interrupted composition with unusual vividness; historical events broke it open like the burst of a shell.

2 months ago | harpers.org | Geoff Dyer

I went home for Christmas in 2009. My mum had been feeling unwell for a while and had taken to her bed on Christmas Eve. I was sitting downstairs in the living room, reading. My dad called down and asked if I could come upstairs. She had collapsed in the bathroom. I phoned for an ambulance and, when it arrived, spoke calmly to the paramedics—a man and a woman.

2 months ago | harpers.org | Emily Harnett

It is roughly three o’clock in the afternoon in Assisi, and the chapel of St. Mary Maggiore is thronged with pilgrims. I hover above them, watching via a camera perched discreetly on the ceiling. The camera points down at a white casket. On the side of the casket is a window, through which I can see the body of a teenage boy: his jeans, his Nikes, his navy track jacket. The pilgrims proceed single file past the boy, who has been dead now for many years.

2 months ago | harpers.org | Emily Harnett

It is roughly three o’clock in the afternoon in Assisi, and the chapel of St. Mary Maggiore is thronged with pilgrims. I hover above them, watching via a camera perched discreetly on the ceiling. The camera points down at a white casket. On the side of the casket is a window, through which I can see the body of a teenage boy: his jeans, his Nikes, his navy track jacket. The pilgrims proceed single file past the boy, who has been dead now for many years.