“I am just one parent. What if more parents read translated books with their children?”
Literature
Misdirectives
“A public high school teacher asks why the wrong things cause a fuss in schools.”
The Terrifying Car Crash That Inspired a Masterpiece
“Fifty years ago, a Kansas family picked up a hitchhiker on their way to Iowa. What happened on that drive became part of literary history.”
‘The Ways of Fiction Are Devious Indeed’
Sands Hall, a playwright and daughter of author Oakley Hall, digs into the work of Wallace Stegner — specifically his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angle of Repose, which is based on the life of Mary Hallock Foote. “[W]e often fold in the real with the invented,” writes Hall, but when does inspiration become plagiarism? Yet in […]
On Writing: An Abecedarian
“To be inside the cathedral of a language is to be inside a particular view of the world.”
We Need to Translate More Armenian Literature
“We need them to assert our very existence.”
The Function and Language of Ancient Sexual Texts
A fascinating look at so-called obscenity, then and now.
Novelist Charles Portis Was a True Original
Every Portis fan has a different favorite passage from his novels, but they agree on one thing: no one wrote like Portis.
The Early Years of Elif Batuman’s Interest in Russian Authors
How a college student’s scholarly investigation into whether Tolstoy was murdered led to her first book, about the people obsessed with Russian literature.
In Defense of Boris the Russki
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.