Ishmael Reed Gets the Last Laugh
America’s most fearless satirist has seen his wildest fictions become reality.
Writers
The Minor Regional Novelist
A profile of Pulitzer Prize- and Oscar-winning author Larry McMurtry.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Extraction"
Two friends reside in the home of a deceased writer.
The High Life and Fast Times of Jim Dent
The author of The Junction Boys can’t tell you how many times he’s been arrested.
The Lone Charge of William B. Perkins
A correspondent is thrown into an unexpected battle.
"But war is a spirit. War provides for those that it loves. It provides sometimes death and sometimes a singular and incredible safety. There were few ways in which it was possible to preserve Perkins. One way was by means of a steam-boiler. Perkins espied near him an old, rusty steam-boiler lying in the bushes. War only knows how it was there, but there it was, a temple shining resplendent with safety. With a moan of haste, Perkins flung himself through that hole which expressed the absence of the steam-pipe."
A Literary History of the San Andreas Fault: Bolinas
On the writers, poets and beats in a reclusive California town, where residents repeatedly tear down highway signs indicating its location.
Not Nice
A profile of Maurice Sendak.
This American Lie
Fact-checking David Sedaris.
H.P. Lovecraft, Author, Is Dead
A survey of the 20th century’s greatest horror writer’s afterlife of influence.
How I Killed My Mother
Exploring the relationship between authors and their parents.
It mattered to her that she could have, or might have, been a writer, and perhaps it mattered to me more than I fully understood. She watched my books appear with considerable interest, and wrote me an oddly formal letter about the style of each one, but she was, I knew, also uneasy about my novels. She found them too slow and sad and oddly personal. She was careful not to say too much about this, except once when she felt that I had described her and things which had happened to her too obviously and too openly. That time she said that she might indeed soon write her own book. She made a book sound like a weapon.
Navahoax
How Timothy Patrick Barrus, a white writer of gay erotica, reinvented himself a (wildly successful) Native American memoirist.
The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami
A profile of the writer.
Just Kids
On the tangled early careers of Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Mary Karr and Jeffrey Eugenides.
