Melville’s Confidence Man Today
Does Herman Melville's 1857 novel The Confidence-Man have anything to tell us about our present day? Philip Roth thinks so.
Kathleen Collins and Black Women’s Sexuality
A new book is getting a lot of attention in the literary world right now…although its author died ...
The QWERTY Truth
How did the QWERTY keyboard became the gold standard? The answer is probably not what you'd think. Welcome to the economic concept of "path dependence."
Francis Picabia’s Chameleonic Style
The Francis Picabia retrospective at MoMA is wowing museumgoers again with his ever-shifting, always challenging art.
How Slaughterhouse-Five Made Us See the Dresden Bombing Differently
The bombing of Dresden, Germany, which began February 13, 1945, was once viewed as a historical footnote. Until Slaughterhouse-Five was published.
Edgar Allan Poe and the Power of a Portrait
Edgar Allan Poe knew that readers would add their visual image of the author to his work to create a personality that informed their reading.
The Mystery of the Mona Lisa
The mystery surrounding the 1911 theft and subsequent conspiracy theory catapulted the Mona Lisa into the popular imagination.
Zadie Smith
Ever since the publication of White Teeth, Zadie Smith has made a career of writing about the actual experiences behind topics like race and immigration.
The Glamorous Tradition of Hollywood Lifestyle Advice
For more than a century, Hollywood has been offering Americans lifestyle advice on how to live better, and the public has been gobbling it up.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison, the first African American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born to working-class ...