October 31, 2025 – "That bungalow was where I first read Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place—a chorus of a novel about a small ...

A crate full of chain falls got delivered. It was a glorious crate, made of sanded spruce. I unscrewed some of the planking ...

Jan Kerouac’s darker and more extreme brand of mischief make her father’s On the Road high jinks seem tame and even a tad ...

Five weeks after Fort Sumter, the official starting point of the war, Ellsworth’s Fire Zouaves received the command to sail ...

For a long time, Edward P. Jones has been one of the two or three writers most important to me. When I teach his stories, ...

The other day, I was on the phone with the playwright and actor David Cale, and he told me about filming a movie in Montana, where a cowboy gave him a cowboy hat. He wore it all the time. He wouldn’t ...

January 22, 2013 – Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the premiere of The Crucible. In this interview, Arthur Miller discusses the writing of the play, and the McCarthy ...

February 19, 2015 – André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t ...

“What confuses me so much about those who have prescriptions for how to write is that they assume all humans experience the world the same way.” ...

It’s free money,” I told my friend during a subway ride. “It’s as easy as watching TV in your head or playing with dolls.” ...

An encounter with Emerson’s essays. This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as ...

Let me tell you about a color that began as a fabled drink. It tasted harsh and punishing, like medicine. It began as a mythic elixir, and then later became a fashionable green: a color for flappers ...