Wunderkind

As a gifted piano student, Konstantin struggles to hold on to beauty and bravado among the bleakness and brutality of late-Cold War Bulgaria, where his talents are rigidly cultivated even as his independence is stifled. Nikolai Grozni tells the semi-autobiographical story of a place and time that, like childhood or a moving passage of music, exists now only in memory.

May 20: Blue jeans celebrate their unofficial 140th birthday today, the dry goods merchant Levi Strauss and the tailor Jacob Davis receiving a patent on May 20, 1873 for "a new article of manufacture, a pair of pantaloons having the…

Ethan Rutherford and Matt Burgess (Dogfight: A Love Story) on the writing of Rutherford's surreal and fiercely funny story collection The Peripatetic Coffin

advertisement