Harper's Magazine

1 week ago | harpers.org | Charlie Lee

One night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact particularly exceptional. This was Bacon County, Georgia, where in those days “it was not unusual for a man to shoot at his wife,” as he wrote in his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place.

1 month 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.

2 months 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 | Jonathon Sturgeon

Kentuckiana is cursed. François-René de Chateaubriand, on vacation from the French Revolution, coursed down the Ohio River and got misty-eyed about the “magnificent country” of Kentucky, “which means ‘river of blood,’ ” he would scribble, wrongly. The lamplight of Louisville, seen from the river, became a chain of beacon fires bringing news from Old Europe, where King Louis XVI, who gave the city its name, would be beheaded.

Mar 28, 2025 | 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.