LATELY, MADISON SQUARE PARK has provided a staging area for provocative art installations, pop-up food courts and outdoor work spaces. Perhaps what most peop...

I owned the cottage right from the beginning. Or it owned me. For one thing, it was so old. Later we found it on maps dating back to the mid-1700s — it was i...

He pointed a way for American fiction out of the doldrums of postmodernism, writes George Blecher. For a culture troubled by the corrosive commercial media a...

Email, text messaging and social networks have revolutionized the way we communicate. Yet as the magic of instantaneity fades, George Blecher begins to miss ...

Tough materialism and existential frankness, an awareness of one’s mortality balanced by the refusal to talk bullshit: George Blecher selects three works of ...

No translator can translate equally well. A lot gets lost in translation. Some languages don’t translate well. These are just some of the translator’s dirty ...

At first you don’t notice them. They’re so skinny that in a crowd of three or more at a street corner or in a mall, they disappear. When you finally see them...

Eating in a Manhattan midtown restaurant the other night, I happened to glance over at the bar area. People were perched on bar stools, leaning into each ot...

George Blecher discusses the timeliness of Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class” and traces his own lust for the “predatoriness” of the leisure cl...