“This is a hard thing to say, but it’s absolutely true—when I think of the men I’ve been with, every one of them stood between me and my writing.”

During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. 

Sigrid Nunez on Leonard Michaels’s ode to all things feline, ‘A Cat.’