Features & Reviews

Literary magazines, once the backbone, the pulse, and other anatomically analogous words of the American fiction world, have taken a hit in subscriptions in recent decades. Does this mean the death of fiction as we know it, or simply a…

“Page after page, Bobcat Country stirs both the counter-intuitively satisfying ‘Should I be reading this?’ queasiness of the Confessional poetry of Berryman, Sexton, and Snodgrass, and the unsettlingly provocative “Is this really poetry?” queasiness of such Muumuu House-affiliated poets as…

“Another day of volunteering at Rikers Island with the NYPL has come to a close. Thursday I went to one of the male detention houses along with my mentor and two other staff members from NYPL. We were there for ‘book cart service,’ which…

Mark Twain died one hundred years ago on this date, so you’ll have to forgive us for mentioning the great author twice in one day. The Library of America has posted an excerpt from The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers…

“An extraordinary literary ‘whodunnit’ over the identity of a mystery reviewer who savaged works by some of Britain’s leading academics on the Amazon website has culminated in a top historian admitting that the culprit was, in fact, his wife.” The…

“In the immediate days following Ray’s death, I did not teach. Colleagues urged that I take more time off, even the entire semester, but I was eager to return to my fiction workshops the following week, on February 27, in…

“He was less well-known, but no less talented, as a literary critic. Proof of it has resided, mostly unnoticed, in a small library in Redding, Conn., where hundreds of his personal books have sat in obscurity for 100 years. They…

“How and what we tell ourselves about our lives matters. The words we choose matter, and how we shape the story matters.” Grace Talusan reviews Katherine Shonk’s debut novel, Happy Now?.