A George Saunders Outtake
George Saunders' trademark dark humor is especially on display in this "deleted scene" from the novella Pastoralia, available for free here.
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 ...
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.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison, the first African American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born to working-class ...
George Orwell’s 1984
George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 finds itself at the top of the best-seller lists this week, the first of Trump's presidency.
Rebecca Harding Davis, American Realist
How do we record the voices of those who are silenced? We might do well to remember one of ...
The Revelatory Rabbits of Watership Down
On Christmas Eve we lost Richard Adams, the British writer whose 1972 novel Watership Down became one of the bestselling children’s books of all time.