Tag: Literature

A fascinating look at so-called obscenity, then and now.

Every Portis fan has a different favorite passage from his novels, but they agree on one thing: no one wrote like Portis.

How a college student’s scholarly investigation into whether Tolstoy was murdered led to her first book, about the people obsessed with Russian literature.

Ayşegül Savaş calls into question a kind of racism in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and laments the liberal reluctance to rebuke discrimination outright, regardless of its targets.

There are numerous ways to tell stories. In her turn MFA program, one writer encountered a literary culture that espoused gendered aesthetics and fostered toxic masculinity.

“I was looking for texts that seem to go the extra mile in hiding something — texts that almost seem to be begging to be interpreted in terms of what’s not being said.”

You never stop learning how to read — probably because you also never stop forgetting how to read.

A bibliophile tries to understand her father through his favorite Swedish mystery books.

“The Blackist,” a column for Catapult’s magazine, introduces audiences to out-of-print novels written by black authors.

After publishing her first book, Lauren Markham begins the long search for what she truly wanted after writing it.

Honoring Peter Mayer, founder of Overlook Press, and one of “the stars of book publishing.”

A new Indigenous MFA program is becoming an incubator for Native American writing, free of white Eurocentric standards.

On the passing of a MacArthur Genius forgotten for decades, re-discovered by ‘A Public Space’ editor Brigid Hughes.

After taking over from George Plimpton, Brigid Hughes was pushed out as the editor of The Paris Review and omitted from the magazine’s history.

The first woman translator of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ subtly unpacks the politics of the poem — and of the male translators that preceded her.

Traveling to Arkansas to search for mythic poet Frank Stanford.

Families are complicated. Caring for Grandpa John was even more so.

When life’s greatest pleasure is the one you have to quit.

With her profiles of Toni Morrison, Dave Chapelle, James Baldwin, and more, Ghansah is an unparalleled chronicler of black excellence.

After her father was arrested for fraud, Pearl Abraham began the the slow, painful process of unraveling her Hasidic family ties.

In this short story, the children of Chinese miners in the frontier West struggle to survive after their parents’ death.

Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about how ghosts and authors of fiction share a similar role in today’s culture.

The author talks with The Paris Review about writing, crime fiction, and his depiction of Black American life.

J.K. Rowling’s first book was published 20 years ago today. Did it create better readers, or just more of them?

Fifty years after he published Oranges, one writer traces McPhee’s story to Florida to assess the state of American citrus.

In the essay “So What Shall I Write About?” from Monkey Business magazine, Haruki Murakami gives readers a glimpse into his creative process and how to become a novelist.

Dorothy Allison on how American culture “inherently devalues the poor, the working class, the darks, the queer, the other.”

Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on The Train and Into the Water, reflects on two unreliable things: narrators and memory.

The cover was striking: it showed a syringe. On the back cover one character leaned over a table, snorting cocaine. The calls from radio stations began, the advertising spots, the letters, above all the letters. Girls telling me about their first acid trip. Gay guys who’d been thrown out of their houses. Girls in love […]

George du Maurier’s Trilby, published in 1894, became one of the most popular novels of its time. The story introduced us to a young heroine, Trilby, and a memorable villain, Svengali, whose names have since taken on lives of their own.