A few nights ago, my mother said the damnedest thing: “I saw half a dozen erections before I ever had sex.” Something else she recently said: “Of course I didn’t kiss him. The last three times I kissed a man on a first date, I ended up married.” Some

The following highly efficient summaries are from Abridged Classics: Brief Summaries of Books You Were Supposed to Read but Probably Didn’t by John Atkinson. Not recommended for use in study. __________________________________ From Abridged Cl

What makes an author underrated? Well, there’s an argument to be made that most literary writers are—by virtue of the fact that these days they are sorely under-read by the culture at large. But even within the sphere of the literary community, some

Night after night, you can observe one of the greatest wonders of nature from your garden, as long as the weather plays along. I have long been interested in astronomy, the study of the stars and other celestial bodies. In contrast to astrology, whic

In the second episode of AMC’s new drama Dietland, the body of a photographer is dropped out of a plane during Fashion Week. Before his untimely end, Malleck Ferguson, the victim, wore large, ugly, 1970s-style glasses, strutted around his shoots like

In 2016, Paul Beatty became the first American author to win the Man Booker Prize. Given that perhaps most readers came to know Beatty’s prose through an excerpt from his first novel published in Granta in 1996, the honor seems especially appropriate

I’m riding a highball double-stack train into soy fields in Western Montana. The sun hangs low over the distant hills and two long fingers of railroad track burn gold on the empty line. I’ve barely slept in the last three days. The ceaseless rattle a

Charlotte Perkins Gilman is best known today for “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a widely anthologized and frequently taught short story that mixes gothic conventions with feminist insights—a chilling dissection of patriarchy that seems as if it could have b

Fear and Helplessness in California On the morning of June 3, 1968, Robert Francis Kennedy, hoping to secure his late-surging campaign for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination, was driving in his open-air motorcade through San Francisco. It

I was 22 when I read Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior for the first time. I had just graduated from college and moved from rural Vermont to New York City, and I had very little idea what I was doing. Sure, I sort of wanted to be a writer, but I also sti

Will Schwalbe talks to professor, writer, and cultural commentator Brittney Cooper on grappling with questions on religion and learning to manage uncertainty. Will Schwalbe: Hi, I’m Will Schwalbe, and this is But That’s Another Story. When I was gro

From essays to interviews, excerpts and reading lists, we publish around 150 features a month. And though we’re proud of each week’s offerings, we do have our personal favorites. Below are some of our favorite pieces of writing from the month at Lit

Poetry is about “slowing down and bringing people together” for Susan MacTavish Best, co-host of this year’s Poetry Society of America Spring Benefit, held at the New York Botanical Garden. That theme certainly ran through the night, as literary lumi

When one thinks of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (AAAL)—or, indeed, if one thinks of any such similarly august institution, the British Academy, say, or France’s Order of Arts and Letters—a bit of sepia enters the picture: stiff, formal po

Two slim volumes and some correspondence: that’s all that the secondary-school art teacher from Drohobycz left us as literary output. Before Bruno Schulz’s murder in 1942 by Nazi officer Karl Günther, he was rumored to have been working on a novel, T

I don’t know why I don’t remember it very well. I was a junior studying art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Most of my friends were pretty arty. We all knew who Andy Warhol was, of course—we’d even sat through a screening of Chelsea Girls

I spent some time this week carefully re-reading Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior, a book that is (somehow!) turning 30 this weekend. If you’re so inclined, you will be able to read my in-depth thoughts about it on Monday, on a little site I like to cal

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) –Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself” By the time I turned 30, I’d lived the majority of my life believing that it was my duty to despise my fat body as

Four guys are sitting on voluptuously padded recliners watching Breaking Bad on a huge flat-screen television with their legs elevated and drains attached to their chests. A copy of GQ with a cover of Katy Perry showing lots of cleavage is strewn on

Poet and memoirist Reginald Dwayne Betts and novelist Zachary Lazar join V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell for the first of two special episodes on the effects of mass incarceration on American communities and democracy. Betts, a poet, memoiris

My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy. It’s easy to imagine a Romantic portrait making the most of young Mary Godwin’s ethereal pallor: unfortunate that we often catch her in the decidedly un-ethereal process of t

One of the advantages of getting old—and, believe it or not, there are others—is that you get to reread (and sometimes re-reread) books that you first knew 60 or more years earlier. Some writers are always with us—Jane Austen, for instance, for peopl

Early on in my MFA, I workshopped a chapter of my novel I had reworked several times already and thought was particularly strong. I was in the habit of workshopping writing I thought was good—I seemed not to understand that the workshop was for those

I’m going to tell you about two projects I started, because I think you should start projects like them, too. Both the Black Bear Club Reading Series and the Travelin’ Appalachians Revue were born out of frustration with the boozy and largely apathet

Before I’d ever run a marathon or written a novel, I often likened the two. But now when I tell people I ran a marathon, I don’t often mention that I finished running just after organizers turned the clock off, around six hours. That’s why there’s n

Seton Hall University is in South Orange, a short hour and a half drive from Camden, but it was far enough away from home for me to stumble into new experiences and fail outside the watchful gaze of those I feared shaming. It was also close enough to

If we agree that each place’s idiosyncratic history gives rise to particular cultures and literatures, then we might go on to argue that Scandinavia’s unique literary manifestation has particularly important things to tell the early 21st-century worl

Sometimes it feels as though our favorite writers burst from the womb fully-formed, slinging wisdom and polished drafts from the crib. But even the most legendary of writers had to start somewhere—and often that somewhere was in the under-read pages

I do not and have never really lived in nature. After growing up in a suburb of Chicago and going to college in Columbia, Missouri (pop. 120,612), I moved to Boston. When I look out my window, I see a small parking lot and a dumpster, flanked on eith

after Dorothea Grossman It was your idea to teach me how to sleep under the stars       how to hold a gun      how to shoot it in the air              and firework it     across the setting sun          a silver dragonfly with a singular purpose: