Ten Poems about Sleep and Dreaming
Visions of the unconscious by Emily Dickinson, Louise Glück, Lucille Clifton, Carl Phillips, and more.
Minimalist Fiction in Six Short Stories
The art of saying more with less, by Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Frederick Barthelme, Jayne Anne Phillips, Mary Robison, and Ann Beattie.
10 Contemporary Pastoral Poems
Poems that reflect and reinterpret the pastoral tradition, by Louise Glück, Alex Dimitrov, Rebecca Lehmann, Sam Sax, Natasha Trethewey, and more.
The War on Bugs
In the 1950s, supersized insects were the villains in a rash of big-screen horror movies. What did those monstrous roaches represent, and how were they vanquished?
I Hear America Singing
Japanese American poet Garrett Hongo is a guiding spirit to a glorious cacophony, an exuberant collective thrum made of different tongues and peoples.
Olivia: An Oft-Overlooked Lesbian Novel
It took some fifteen years to bring Dorothy Strachey Bussy’s remarkable roman à clef to print, thanks to André Gide’s lukewarm reception.
Reversing the Trade of Māori Tattooed Heads
Preserved heads decorated with tā moko, or facial tattoos, were sacred objects to New Zealand's Māori. Then Europeans started collecting them.
How Facebook Revived the Epistolary Friendship
Would today's online, social media-based friendships look familiar to the letter-writing friends of earlier centuries, when epistolary friendships were also common?
How We Escape It: An Essay
Escape is an ancient word, escapism, a modern one, and the designation of a genre—“escape literature”—dates to the 1930s.