Photograph: Still from  "Only Murders in the Building"

Source: Hulu

Why Mystery Fiction Is So Engaging

Tracking down the killer appeal of the hit show Only Murders in the Building.
Portrait of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo

The Women (Real and Imagined) Resisting Caudillos

In Latin America and the Caribbean, women's groups have acted to oppose military dictatorships. In fiction, their roles are rarely that of protagonist.
New York city from Hoboken, New Jersey, c. 1800

The Early American Radical Fiction of John Lithgow

In the early 1800s, the Scottish immigrant wrote an anonymous tract imagining equality. He was worried about the brand-new American republic.
A devil shaking hands with a student

Rare 1969 Story from The Queen’s Gambit Author Walter Tevis

In this short story a graduate student makes a deal with the devil: Write my dissertation and my soul is yours.
Adolph Menzel -The Iron Rolling Mill

Life in the Iron Mills as Fiction of the “Close-Outsider Witness”

Rebecca Harding Davis had no firsthand experience of iron mills. Neither does her nameless narrator.
HG Wells, 1904

H.G. Wells’s Letters to Cora Crane

The correspondence between famous novelist H.G. Wells and Cora Crane, the partner of "The Red Badge of Courage" author Stephen Crane.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“The Yellow Wallpaper” and Women’s Pain

Charlotte Gilman wrote her famous short story in response to her own experience having her pain belittled and misunderstood by a male physician.
Bestselling author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at HCLS Miller Branch.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I Became Black in America

Adichie speaks on the meaning of blackness, sexism in Nigeria, and whether the current feminist movement leaves out black women.
Florida car

Wild and Finally Free in Lauren Groff’s Florida

Lauren Groff’s latest story collection explores the literary archetype of the Orphan.
Samuel Richardson

Why the First Novel Created Such a Stir

Samuel Richardson's Pamela, the first novel in English, astounded and terrified readers. Authors have striven for the same effect since.