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Jane Alison on Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff
Wavelets A North Carolina beach where I sometimes rent a small carousel house in the dunes meets both ocean and inlet: it’s at the bottom tip of an island, where seawater rushes into a bay. Atlantic...
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The Wild Visionary at the Heart of Early Christianity
Who founded Christianity? The obvious answer, of course, is Jesus Christ, although this is complicated and misleading: “Christ” was not the last name of Jesus! It simply means “the anointed one” in...
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Amy Tan Reflects on 30 Years Since The Joy Luck Club
I am a realist, not prone to outlandish dreams, and thus, rarely disappointed. Before The Joy Luck Club was published in March 1989, I told my husband that my novel would be on bookstore shelves for...
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Was Shakespeare Agnostic About the Afterlife?
April 23rd is celebrated worldwide as Shakespeare’s birthday, with people reviving him and his work through performances, sonnet read-a-thons, and even marking the occasion as “Talk Like Shakespeare...
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The Ongoing Obsession with Shakespeare’s True Identity
Bear pit. War zone. Mad house. My first serious contact with 21st-century Shakespeare studies was during my doctorate at Monash University. Rumor had it that the Clayton campus was the main recruiting...
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What I Learned from Keeping a List of Every Book I Read
I don’t keep a diary, but I do save two kinds of reading lists. One in an app is labeled “Books to Read.” It contains hundreds of titles, loosely organized by genres. The other has the titles of all...
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The Real Life Castaway Behind Robinson Crusoe Actually Asked to Be Dropped Off
Three hundred years ago this week, a convicted heretic, hustler and ex-spy published a book about a reckless young man washed up on a deserted island. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe presented itself as...
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James Baldwin in Paris: On the Virtuosic Shame of Giovanni’s Room
Early in Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin’s seminal novelistic exploration of queerness, the narrator, David, remembers the first time he held another man’s body close to his own. He has spent a day with...
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Yukio Mishima on the Beautiful Death of James Dean
The beautiful should die young, and everyone else should live as long as possible. Unfortunately, 95 percent of people get it backwards, with gorgeous people lingering into their eighties and hideous...
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A Brief History of Queer Language Before Queer Identity
Throughout literary history, queers have had to be smarter than the rest: we’ve had to hide in plain sight. In a literary canon full of straight, white men, it can be a powerful thing to suggest that...
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