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But many years later, when I enrolled in a PhD program in Russian literature, I decided to remain focused and serious, immersing myself in Tolstoy and Gogol and Babel, getting better acquainted with Russian writers I might have already studied had I never emigrated from Moscow at the age of seven. Imagine my guilty pleasure, then, at discovering, among the Dostoyevskys and Bulgakovs, an author who spearheaded the modern Russian best seller, the Judith Krantz of fin de siècle Russia—Anastasya Verbitskaya.

The guy kept writing, and he kept not dying. When Lee Meriwether was born in 1862, Jefferson Davis dandled him on his knee; he remembered fleeing with his family from Sherman’s invading troops. By the time he died in 1966—just a year after writing his final memoir—the Beatles were recording Revolver. Meriwether’s grandmother spoke of meeting George Washington, and yet today there are still people who remember Lee as an old man.

I had discovered an American Methuselah: quite possibly the only writer whose memory spans the entire history of the republic.

Anna Keesey brings us to The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford’s brutal tale of childhood’s end on a Colorado ranch, in today’s Lost & Found from our vault.  Since this piece first ran in 2002, the novel has been reissued by New York Review Books. At the end of her life Jean Stafford looked like a [...]

Between its recent return to print and its 2010 Coen brothers adaptation, True Grit has been feeling the love as of late. This wasn’t always the case. This prescient Lost & Found from 2004 sees Cassandra Cleghorn appreciating Portis’s American epic before it was cool, before it was even cooler. (You can’t get much cooler [...]

Today’s Lost & Found is a present to Edgar Allan Poe in anticipation of his 203rd birthday this Thursday.  After all, what might please Poe more than the peculiar gift of a one-off writing doppelganger, shadowing his work from half a world and a whole century away?  Here’s A. N. Devers on the uncanny Edogawa [...]

Dani Shapiro charts the brutal course of Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies in this Lost & Found from our archives. Janet Hobhouse had published a few novels before The Furies, and she had something of a presence as a critic in the 1980s art world, but she was more of a figure than a writer in [...]

David Gates takes on In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, Galen Rowell’s account of the 1975 K2 disaster, in this Lost and Found from Tin House’s second issue. Since I’ve never climbed a mountain and never hankered to, it’s weird that I obsessively read and reread mountaineering books. I’d guess what I’m hankering [...]

Just in time for New Year’s Eve revelry, Daniel Handler raises a toast to the cocktail and Bernard DeVoto’s classic treatise on drink culture, The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto.

In today’s Lost & Found, former Tin House staffer Diana Fox finds worthy holiday reading in Dodie Smith’s cult favorite I Capture the Castle.  Austen fans, when the spine on your copy of Northanger Abbey finally goes, turn here. Dodie Smith is not an unknown writer, but few people recognize her name as belonging to [...]

Before David Sedaris endured Santaland, Patricia Highsmith served on the front lines of holiday retail.  Peter Behrens looks at Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, the novel germinated by her experience, in today’s Lost & Found. Is Patricia Highsmith the most unjustifiably ignored American novelist of her post-war generation? In the United Sates, Highsmith’s reputation rests [...]

Kim Adrian unpacks Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. in today’s Lost & Found. Lispector would’ve turned 91 this coming Saturday.  We recommend marking the occasion with cake, but devotees that go the cockroach route have our respect–from a great, great distance. Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. chronicles—in maddening detail—one woman’s [...]

In today’s Lost & Found from our vaults, Francine Prose gives us one more thing to be thankful for: the otherworldly work of master storyteller Andrei Platonov.  Prose’s take on The Fierce and Beautiful World first appeared in our 2006 International Issue. I spent the first part of last summer reading The Fierce and Beautiful [...]

All cookbooks should include Lillian Hellman.

In our younger and more vulnerable years, Tommy Wallach wrote a Lost & Found that we’ve been turning over in our minds ever since.  Here’s his read on Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz and its author’s curious place in literary consciousness. F. Scott Fitzgerald is perhaps the most celebrated American author of the twentieth [...]

Fix yourself a peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwich in honor of today’s Lost and Found.  We’re venturing back to Tin House’s third issue for Robert Polito’s read on Priscilla, Elvis and Me by Michael Edwards. Inadvertence—ordinarily the predilection of surrealists and cranks—also spikes the most plangent as-told-to books and celebrity (or almost-celebrity) memoirs.  Remove [...]

In honor of Halloween, we’re fathoming the dark netherworld of one of pop culture’s spookiest phenomena: Céline Dion and the fans that love her. Brian DeLeeuw plays Virgil for our Lost & Found sojourn into Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.  Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. [...]

Steve Almond sings the praises of Francois Camoin’s Like Love, but Not Exactly in today’s Lost & Found from the vault.  Since this piece first appeared in 2006, Camoin has published a new book, April, May, and So on, which you can find through our friends at Powell’s here. I have, over the past five years [...]

In today’s Lost & Found, Katie Arnold-Ratliff considers two memoirs of life in the 1%–Better Than Sane by Alison Rose and A Mother’s Story by Gloria Vanderbilt–and her relationship with both authors.  For more of Katie’s writing, check out her debut novel, Bright Before Us. In April 1996, the New Yorker published an article entitled [...]

In celebration of the spirit of occupation, today’s Lost & Found features Robert Gray on A Humument, Tom Phillips’s repossession of a forsaken Victorian novel.  Since this piece was originally published in 2004, A Humument has continued to evolve.  For the latest on the project (there’s a Humument app in the works!) and images of [...]

With the release of Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House, we’ve been thinking about women writers who don’t just push the envelope, but rip it apart and make it anew.  This week’s L&F features two writers capable of such magic: Tin House author A.N. Devers and her subject, [...]

Whence this fragrance wafting through the air?  Why, from this week’s Lost & Found from the vault.  Today, we’ve followed our noses to Elissa Schappell’s  take on Essence and Alchemy by Mandy Aftel.  For an even stronger hit of Elissa’s ambrosial prose, check out her new book, Blueprints for Building Better Girls.  We confess we [...]

It was a busy weekend for Jonathan Dee. On Saturday night, he took home the prestigious St. Francis College Literary Prize for his novel, The Privileges. Sunday saw him talking existentialism and alienation on an author panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival. Now he’s here on the blog. In this week’s Lost & Found from [...]

In each issue of Tin House, our Lost & Found section champions books that have been waylaid or misshelved, overlooked or underdogged.  Every Monday, we’ll be going through our vault to bring you the best of Lost & Found here on the blog. We kick things off this week with Justin Taylor on Stephen King’s [...]

I wrote this Lost & Found piece for our “Games People Play” theme issue (on newsstands now!) right on the brink of the season. The playoffs start this weekend, and if you followed the NBA this year, you’ll know life hasn’t gotten any easier. (If you’re not familiar with my agony, please scroll down for [...]