By some oversight there are still mostly fields between Bologna and Venice, intimately familiar to me after the eight years I spent translating Italian sonnets about farm implements and irrigation troughs by a guy improbably celebrated as the founder of modern Italian poetry. From the train, vast le...

When I lived abroad at the end of my twenties, I luxuriated in feeling unseen. Across the ocean from the city I’d left, I could be anonymous. It thrilled me that no one in this new place knew . . .

If I was writing about trash, I needed to investigate its history. The Covanta incinerator in Newark burns five miles from my house. Beside my office in Queens is the landfill buried under Flushing Meadows Park. I learned that the U.S. is the world’s largest producer of garbage...

Five hundred in cash and a pouch of rum was what we were each paid upon returning the flags. Yet another rally of the big leader behind us and yet another fruitful day of cheering done. . .

I was almost two, and it was altogether a more innocent time, when my family immigrated from Kyiv to Chicago. Reagan was the president-elect, and Disco Demolition Night in Comiskey Park only a few months in the rearview. In those days, my babblings came out in Russian...

Lately, I will look up—from the book covers I'm buried in, or the computer screen I'm plastered to—and experience a mild panic. What have I done with my life, I'll wonder, and has the extraordinary gamble of devoting myself to literature (at the expense of all else) been worth it; has it paid off? ...