A Woman Under the Influence
Mary MacLane's spectacular moods first fueled, then failed her
Holing Up
In Virginia Lee Burton’s classic children’s book Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel burrowing is a way of settling into the ground, not taming it
Wild Wild East
America has never stopped repeating stories about cowboys and Indians, even when the frontier is somewhere else
Dry Bones Breathe
Recovering writers like Henry Dumas from oblivion is a way to alter black destiny.
Open Channels
Fan fiction is more than a genre. It's a technology for generating new feelings out of old texts.
Post-Exotic Novels, Nȯvelles, and Novelists: Part Two
The Post-Exotic novel wants to destroy reality. The second half of Antoine Volodine's essay on the form of the novel, its destruction and its reconstruction
Post-Exotic Novels, Nȯvelles, and Novelists: Part One
The post-exotic novel offers lessons in attacking the strictures of official literature
Trigger for What
Trigger warnings on literature in college courses is not illiberal coddling but a reflection of the false universality of "great books" syllabi
Coming to Las Vegas
In Chris Abani's new novel The Secret History of Las Vegas, universality is in the particular and nothing stays where it's supposed to
Future Islands
If this is what our US-China future portends, how can we change it?
As Goes Naples
The disastrous, corrupt "recovery" of war-shattered Naples in Curzio Malaparte's The Skin reflects the rot at the core of the European peace
Contemporary Scottish Friction
The coming Scottish independence vote has given new energy to the would-be national literary culture
Us and Them
If novels are to help us understand 21st century threats like terrorism, late 20th century masculinist realism will need to give way to hysterical realism
Trivial Pursuits
Why do we think of the kleptomaniac as being usually a woman, and why do we find her so alluring?
Fire Escape
Revolutions are the confused youth of history, paralyzed by possibility even as they’re enthralled by it
Excuses, Excuses
At what point do we recognize an enemy as not merely adversarial, but existential?