With Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan has written an incisive, alive, wit-filled book. In a collection of essays with topics spanning from Bunny Wailer and the caves of Tennessee to TV culture and the Tea Party, again and again Sullivan employs a discriminating, yet encompassing eye when looking at his subjects. …more

Micheline Aharonian Marcom lives in Northern California and teaches at Mills College. She is the author of four novels: Three Apples Fell from Heaven, The Daydreaming Boy, Draining the Sea, and The Mirror in the Well, and has been honored with a Lannan Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Writer’s Award. …more

What is emotionally naked art and why do I think I have to describe the films of John Cassavetes, particularly A Woman Under the Influence, and Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, particularly ”Melanctha,” that way? …more

Lydia Davis is the author of four short story collections, as well as The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis and the novel The End of the Story. A MacArthur Fellow, she has been a finalist for many major book awards and this September will release her translation of Madame Bovary. …more

Magic in movies is a beautiful thing. I’ve inundated myself with film for years, since the age of nineteen, but only recently experienced the pleasure of being put under a spell by two directors I had known of, but whose images I was not ready for. …more

In curt sentences detailing many unsettled lives, Kim Chinquee constructs a mosaic of despair in modern day America. Life is already hard, but attempts at intimacy (what many of the people in these pages seek) do not always further the characters’ life but leaves them confused and sorry—sometimes stoic. …more

Paula Fox is the author of six novels, including the landmark Desperate Characters. She has also written two memoirs, Borrowed Finery and The Coldest Winter and won numerous awards for these and her twenty-two children’s books. Now 86, she lives in the same brownstone in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn she bought in 1970 after the sale of the film rights for Desperate Characters. …more