Christian Lorentzen

Asense​ of ‘boundlessness’ afflicts Adam Gordon, the narrator of Ben Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). Adam is a poet on a fellowship in Madrid, using phone cards to call home to Kansas because he’s not settled enough to own a mobile phone. Being young abroad, open to new friendships and love affairs, writing without serious deadlines or money...

It was​ in a Quonset hut south of the Potomac that Peter Matthiessen met James Jesus Angleton, ‘a cadaverous, hawk-boned man with dark hair, large elfin ears and a lively intelligent face behind horn-rimmed glasses’, as Matthiessen later described him in an unpublished account of his recruitment to the CIA in the autumn of 1950. They had a ‘pleasant talk’. In True...

There’s​ a morbid aspect to Libertyville, the Chicago suburb where Pan, Michael Clune’s first novel, is set: ‘At night in the Midwest in winter,’ we are told, ‘the raw death of the endless future … is sometimes bare inches above the roofs.’ It’s the kind of thought that could only occur to a sullen teenager with a flair for melodrama....

Crossroads, watershed, turning or tipping point, whatever cliché falls just this side of revolution: that’s the way the New York Democratic mayoral primary on 24 June will be remembered decades from now if Zohran Mamdani wins. Or it will be just another occasion when the Clintonite centrist zombies of the Democratic Party – in the surly guise of the former governor of...

After two hours​ on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport, the flight was cancelled and we were deplaned. I had been seated next to a former congresswoman who lost to another incumbent in 2022 as a result of redistricting, after decades in the House of Representatives. Like me, she was on her way to Chicago to attend the Democratic National Convention. The next morning she was due to have...