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On Soseki’s Bitingly Critical Novel, I Am a Cat
In December 1904, Natsume Sōseki’s creative energy geysered, bearing him upward in the space of 16 months into the empyrean of Japanese writers who were taken seriously. His output during the first act...
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Be a Better Reader: Get Outside Your Genre Comfort Zone
It’s a rule of publishing that you don’t complain about your blurbs. If a fellow author is going to take the time and effort to read your book and offer a quote, you accept their words gratefully and...
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The Power of W. G. Sebald’s Small Silences
Anyone who has read The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald’s penultimate novel, likely remembers the book’s final pages. The Rings of Saturn follows a Sebald-like narrator as he walks along England’s...
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The Truth of Ray Bradbury’s Prophetic Vision
In the late 1960s my friend J. G. Ballard phoned me full of outrage. Feeling weighed down by the bad prose cluttering his study, he had dug a pit in his back garden and thrown his review copies in,...
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The 12 Best Sherlock Holmes Stories, According to Arthur Conan Doyle
In June of 1891, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the first short story featuring everyone’s favorite consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, was published in The Strand Magazine. (A Study in Scarlet and The Sign...
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Sex, Drugs, Rock n’ Roll, and Mystical Poets
“God gave rock n’ roll to you, put it in the soul of everyone.” –Kiss, singing in the sequel to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. HOW TO (SAY) FUCK AND MEAN IT Beth...
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David Hayden: “Men Still Too Often See Their Writing as the Canon”
One winter afternoon in 1981, I was between shifts as a kitchen porter in a big sea-front hotel in Blackpool. I had a brown manila pay packet in my pocket with £16 and change in it. I stood in a branch...
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Is This the Year Dag Solstad Becomes a Household Name?
If we agree that each place’s idiosyncratic history gives rise to particular cultures and literatures, then we might go on to argue that Scandinavia’s unique literary manifestation has particularly...
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Robert Gottlieb on a Neglected Russian Classic
One of the advantages of getting old—and, believe it or not, there are others—is that you get to reread (and sometimes re-reread) books that you first knew 60 or more years earlier. Some writers are...
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When Walt Whitman’s Poems Were Rejected For Being Too Timely
On October 10th, 1861, the editors of The Atlantic Monthly sent an impersonal rejection letter to Walt Whitman. It read: Dear Sir:—We beg to inclose to your address, in two envelopes, the three poems...
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Babies, The Big Sleep, Cult Writers, and More: Our Favorite Stories of May
From essays to interviews, excerpts and reading lists, we publish around 150 features a month. And though we’re proud of each week’s offerings, we do have our personal favorites. Below are some of our...
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The Nightmarish Dream Logic of Bruno Schulz
Two slim volumes and some correspondence: that’s all that the secondary-school art teacher from Drohobycz left us as literary output. Before Bruno Schulz’s murder in 1942 by Nazi officer Karl Günther,...
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The Maternal, Feminist Utopias of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman is best known today for “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a widely anthologized and frequently taught short story that mixes gothic conventions with feminist insights—a chilling...
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Why is Bad Behavior So Good?
I was 22 when I read Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior for the first time. I had just graduated from college and moved from rural Vermont to New York City, and I had very little idea what I was doing....
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20 Notoriously Underrated Writers You Should Be Reading
What makes an author underrated? Well, there’s an argument to be made that most literary writers are—by virtue of the fact that these days they are sorely under-read by the culture at large. But even...
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How Vanya on 42nd Street Captured a Changing New York City
Raymond Carver had a hero and role model: Chekhov. After Carver died, many obituaries suggested Carver was “America’s Chekhov.” The accolade would have likely thrilled, if embarrassed, the humble...
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Stephen King: Master of Almost All the Genres Except “Literary”
Imagine you’re in an airport boarding lounge, or the waiting room at virtually any train station or bus terminal in the Western world. Maybe you commute to work or school by subway. It doesn’t matter....
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The 1961 Novel That Makes a Great Case for Moviegoing
The cinema surrounds us with image and sound—we are transfigured. In “Sweethearts,” a story by Jayne Anne Phillips, two girls go to the movies every Friday and Sunday. There “an aura of light from the...
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Penelope Lively on Virginia Woolf: Serious Gardener?
On the 31st of May 1920, Virginia Woolf went gardening. Here’s what she wrote in her diary: “The first pure joy of the garden . . . weeding all day to finish the beds in a queer sort of enthusiasm...
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Havoc: A Cynical (and Personal) Portrayal of Alcoholism
“A toast to the infinitude of the soul.” Havoc should come with a health warning. Tom Kristensen’s novel, about a thirty-something literary critic who loses himself in a maelstrom of drink, jazz, and...
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