Any Word?
Timeless stories from our 175-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
Letters from the West Bank
[May 2025]
In the cover story for our May issue, Ben Ehrenreich returns to the West Bank, where he had lived ten years ago, to report on the state of the nonviolent resistance movement.
Read “After Nonviolence” by Ben Ehrenreich
[December 2011]
In 2011, Ehrenreich reported on Israel’s water war with Palestine: “Of all the varieties of humiliation that the occupation offers Palestinians, its misery is most routinely experienced through water.”
Read “Drip, Jordan” by Ben Ehrenreich
[September 2024]
Hari Kunzru writes about the failures of PEN America in the wake of October 7th.
Read “Above Politics” by Hari Kunzru
[April 2017]
Palestinian-Americans on the meaning of Donald Trump’s presidency in his first term.
Read “Same Old, Same Old” by Leila Abdelrazaq
[August 2024]
“How much knowing is enough? How much does one need to know so as to know what to think? And what fear might not knowing enough signify? What would knowing enough about Israel and Palestine do? And what does not knowing enough about it allow?”
Read “The Eyes of Others” by Hisham Matar
Mario Vargas Llosa’s Legacy
We, at Harper’s, mourn Mario Vargas Llosa. To celebrate the Nobel Prize winner’s life, we have curated a selection of his work from our archive.
[December 1990]
On Porras Barrenechea, magical realism, and chronicles of discovery and conquest.
Read “Questions of Conquest” by Mario Vargas Llosa
[September 1986]
Vargas Llosa writes about Francis Bacon’s painting Head I: “I lost the left ear to a bite, fighting with another human, I think. But, owing to the little opening that remains, I hear the world’s noises clearly.”
[September 1993]
“The realm of imagination became in Latin America the kingdom of objective reality; fiction was a substitute for social science; our best teachers about reality were the dreamers, the literary artists,” writes Vargas Llosa.
Read “The Real Life of the Latin American Novelist”
Animal Kingdom
[October 2022]
“It’s hard to get people to listen to animal-rights activists anywhere, animal rights being the neglected youngest sibling of even the most committed leftist. Yet it’s particularly challenging in Iowa, where bacon is an unusually good metonym for money.”
Read “Standing Trial” by Elizabeth Barber
[August 1997]
Do creatures have the same rights that we do?
Read “The Inhumanity of the Animal People” by Joy Williams
Word Search
[May 2025]
Our May issue features a selection from Speaking in Tongues, a book-length dialogue between J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos.
[March 2013]
From Here and Now, a collection of letters exchanged by novelists J. M. Coetzee and Paul Auster between 2008 and 2011.
[September 2009]
An excerpt from Coetzee’s novel Summertime.