The story refers to the twins’ father’s participation in “the Slaughter, when all animal life was being extinguished by guns ...

Our seminal blonde, Lorelei Lee, comes from Little Rock, Arkansas, with a dubious backstory full of intrigue. An archetypal faux-naïf, she uses her perceived naïveté to get the better of the gentlemen ...

Vladimir Sorokin, however, is alive; he is quite alive, and when I asked him how and why (along with a clutch of other ...

Dreams are trash. Dreams are ash. A man from Los Angeles left a small ziplock bag of his ashes to me in his will.” ...

My mamaw used to say, ‘I thought life was just one damned thing after another until I realized it’s the same damned thing over and over.’ ” ...

Everybody likes ghazals. Or they do when they learn what they are: A ghazal is a poetic form originating in and strongly associated with the Islamic cultural sphere. It is a medieval thing—or what ...

Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, was originally called “A Happening.” There would have been something of a joke to this discarded title; from one point of view, nothing much happens in the book.

One of Jane Austen’s many mind-bending skills was her ability to wrest so much drama from a world that was, by present-day standards, almost unfathomably static. Austen’s novels are preindustrial time ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...

March 24, 2025 – “Many years ago, the first and only time I ever did acid, I looked down at my hands and noticed that they were not, in fact, “flesh-colored” after all, but contained dozens of colors: ...

Last night I had that dream again, the one about being shot in the face at close range and my mouth flying off down some white corridor, and I’m so angry with myself for not getting out of the way in ...