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It was once commonly understood that fiction was in the wisdom business, that it offered not only aesthetic pleasure but also moral... Read More

In London, trash is called rubbish and taking it out is a science. There is a bag for trash, a bag for compost, and a bag for recycling, a... Read More

In addition to the VA and numerous related state-based agencies, America boasts some 45,000 nonprofits dedicated to helping... Read More

There’s a war going on. No, not the war in Ukraine, nor even the one between Israel and Iran. I mean the one between word processors... Read More

Where does the mind retreat when it frays, stretches, snaps? What sort of physical space can best contain a mind turned anxious, come undone,... Read More

Recently, we read a novel that should be catnip for the literati. One girl, a helpless witness to her mother’s abuse, grows up and... Read More

One of the most frequent conversations surrounding contemporary literature I come across is the constant back and forth between fiction,... Read More

In 1986, I moved to New York, and got a busboy job at a very cool nightclub in Tribeca. I was lucky to get such a job. This was at the height... Read More

Cosmetic surgery continues to rise. Public figures face the most scrutiny, with before and after photos being analyzed with high-pixel,... Read More

Twenty-nine-year-old Madeline Cash is, according to NYLON magazine, a “literary it-girl” and one of the darlings of... Read More

GEORGE SAUNDERS’S NEW “NOVEL” is 174 pages long and has no chapters—or, if you like, is one long chapter. Both it and... Read More

Instead of the word of the Lord, worshippers at the Jan. 18 Sunday prayer service at Cities Church in St. Paul were met with chants such as... Read More

Two months ago, I read a seven-hundred-page collection of short stories by John Cheever. But somehow that wasn’t enough. I went on to... Read More

For the past few decades, the idea of multiculturalism in the U.S. seemed like something soft and mild. Schools and popular media reinforced... Read More

There is a fairly standard protocol governing the deaths of great novelists. First, there is a large memorial event in New York —... Read More

Menstrual cycles are not an illness, and medicating them as if they are—suppressing the body's natural hormonal rhythms—clashes... Read More

I don’t like hockey. I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Pittsburgh Penguins were building their dynasty. It was... Read More

The Shakespeare authorship question — the belief that various academics, actors and writers hold that “William Shakespeare”... Read More

This is the third column in a four-part series by B.D. McClay on speculative fiction. Read the rest here.  There are aliens among... Read More

The autobiographies of jazz musicians are their own siloed literary category, as the musicians themselves belong to an archetype that cannot... Read More

During the civil war in Sierra Leone in 1999, I found myself in a jungle town called Kenema as locals got word that a rebel army was headed... Read More

One of conservatism’s enduring insights is that aesthetics carry real stakes because culture shapes the affections long before reason... Read More

Many people get introduced to the Jewish writer and Holocaust victim Anne Frank via her Diary of a Young Girl in a middle school... Read More

Years ago, when I was interned in a psychiatric unit, I watched as a young woman was wheeled in on a gurney. She was about my age and only... Read More

Somewhere in the ether between Chicago and California, Nebraska endures, a grassy mirage that thwarts any attempt to define it. On a journey... Read More