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1. We Quit the Rat Race   Do you remember the story of Diogenes, the ancient Athenian crackpot? He was the one who gave away all his possessions because “People don’t own possessions, their possessions own them.” He had a drinking cup, but when he saw a child scoop up water by hand, he threw [...]

The best writers not only create worlds beyond our imagination but also lead us into places we’d never dare venture alone. Over their long careers, Stephen King and Margaret Atwood have continually surprised us with their dark worlds. In his new short story “Afterlife,” King transports us into the mind of a man at the [...]

Love is the fart of every heart: It pains a man when ’tis kept close, And others doth offend, when ’tis let loose. Sir John Suckling (1609-1642) When I think of the women I have loved or almost loved, I remember the luxurious, almost lascivious, delectations of shared laughter.  When a woman and I moved [...]

Is that true? Are we all—all of us writers—fans? Fan-like, do we not passionately—sometimes even obsessively—engage with our subjects? Do we not write in order to gain access and understanding? To be able to become part of the greater whole? But what about the freighted and fraught side of fandom? When our desire for access [...]

    Alexxander Dovelin is an illustrator, writer from the internet. Crafting between tea breaks, Alex draws on personal experience and metaphor to produce poems, short stories, and pseudo-philosophies. You’ll find him scribbling over in Portland, OR.

Muhldorf, Austria May 1, 2013 Dear Friend, I am writing to you from a small village outside of Vienna. I am here with the artist, Jason Dodge, and others, living the next few days in a castle not far from the Danube river. I’ll be traveling for a month and wanted to keep in touch. [...]

It takes a special kind of person for whom you can toss together in the same sentence the words “gambol,” “Les Folies Bergères” and “poor girl from Saint Louis who at nineteen charmed and otherwise seriously seduced the art and theater scene in 1920s Paris with her seductive combination of beauty, sensuality, whimsy and physical [...]

We know the title would imply that World Book Night is, well, one night, but temperance has never been our specialty.  On Monday we threw a party for Alexis Smith, whose debut novel Glaciers was chosen as a World Book Night title. It was a fun night for book lovers (many of which were WBN volunteers) [...]

Friday, April 5, 2013: I’m parked in the University of Houston’s chancellor’s office, on the red-and-gold carpeted floor, participating in a sit-in organized by the graduate students. I’ve been here less than two hours, and yet I have no sensation whatsoever below my navel. Occasionally there’s a tingling in the toes of one foot—I’m not [...]

In the war between man and the natural world, it would appear, judging from Brin Levinson’s unpeopled, postapocalyptic cityscapes, nature has won. Levinson’s worlds—washed in dour grays, ochre, and sepia brown—suggest the landscape before us is already becoming a relic. The brightest colors, the occasional burst of blue sky that breaks out from behind cloud-crowded [...]

Is that true? Are we all—all of us writers—fans? Fan-like, do we not passionately—sometimes even obsessively—engage with our subjects? Do we not write in order to gain access and understanding? To be able to become part of the greater whole? But what about the freighted and fraught side of fandom? When our desire for access [...]

The following is excerpted from J.C. Hallman’s Wm & H’ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters between William & Henry James, out now from University of Iowa Press.    .1. ON SEPTEMBER 7, 1861, having lately abandoned a dream of life as an artist and enrolled in Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School, Wm set out from his new, [...]

For those devoted to basketball, the game sometimes comes alive before our very eyes, and transforms us. In such moments we fall in love with basketball all over again, and perhaps regain, for a moment, a renewed hope in the possibilities of life. In this year’s March Madness, a relative unknown, Florida Gulf Coast University, [...]

Not so long ago, I was convalescing from yet another back injury, feeling not a little bit sorry for myself, and digging deep—and I mean deep—into my back catalogue of heretofore un-listened-to podcasts, when I came across an old Sound of Young America episode (a great podcast, by the way, as is its newer incarnation [...]

The week after AWP is a time to reflect. A moment to catch you breath, detox, and assess a convention unlike any other in the literary world. Like many of us, you are still probably trying to digest the awesomeness that was Dana Spiotta and Don DeLillo reading from their first novels, or the bewitchment [...]

In the war between man and the natural world, it would appear, judging from Brin Levinson’s unpeopled, postapocalyptic cityscapes, nature has won. Levinson’s worlds—washed in dour grays, ochre, and sepia brown—suggest the landscape before us is already becoming a relic. The brightest colors, the occasional burst of blue sky that breaks out from behind cloud-crowded [...]

Your password must contain at least one number. It’s a bad idea to put a 1 after a typical word or phrase. Awesome1, for instance, is not awesome, nor is it accurate. Killme2 is a weak password. Password should contain at least one lower case letter. Password should be between 6 and 20 characters, which [...]

The earliest recorded stories are war stories. Some forty thousand years ago, people painted their tales of hunting buffalo and elk and battling fellow humans on the walls of caves. As soon as we could put pen to paper, we recorded for posterity how armies crossed seas and mountains and deserts to clash swords with [...]