When Prince Harry walks down the aisle with the actor Meghan Markle on May 19th, he will become the first royal in two generations to marry someone from the world of the arts. The relationship between royalty and the arts has been uneasy, even perilous....
I was diagnosed with MS in 1993; I’ve never hidden its physical effects. I publicly used a cane, then double crutches, and now a wheelchair and my official bios, including on the flap copy of my 2013 novel, Hild, are clear about the fact...
Tom Wolfe, a pioneering voice of his generation, passed away this week at the age of 88 in New York City. We are extremely honored to have published fourteen of his books. The following is an excerpt from The Right Stuff, his nonfiction...
New York Times bestselling author David Duchovny reimagines the Irish mythological figure of Emer with Miss Subways, a darkly comic fantasy love story set in New York City. Emer is just a woman living in the city, taking the subway,...
As summer finally approaches and the sunshine beckons, it’s hard not to daydream of trading desk chairs for deck chairs or hopping on a plane for an adventurous escape. In the meantime, we offer a list of books that will transport you with stories...
Graffiti Palace, A. G. Lombardo’s debut novel, is a contemporary reimagining of The Odyssey set during the 1965 Watts Riots. Los Angeles is scorching and Americo Monk, a street-haunting graffiti aficionado, is frantically trying to return home. Yet his trek...
Zachary Mason’s new novel Metamorphica reimagines Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in the tradition of Mason’s bestselling debut novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey. His new novel transforms Ovid’s epic poem that is itself about endless...
They gave me a little plastic and cardboard camera. They said go home. Report back. It was Easter weekend in Southern New Mexico. I took the thing around and wound it up and pointed it at different potential epiphanies. But the little plastic box...
I am thirteen. My mom and I are walking down a hallway in the wing of a San Francisco art museum and pass an auditorium. I can hear a voice on the other side of the door, loud, accented, lilting and rolling and sure...
We had filled our backpacks with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We also threw in thermoses of chocolate milk we’d mixed ourselves. We thought the milk would stay cold. At the bottom of our backpacks shook boxes of pellets for our pump-styled air...
Children’s poems are good for the basic disciplines of literature: rhyme and alliteration, thumping solid meter. These all combine in a single ambition, which is to make the poem memorable. In this, this particular poem has clearly succeeded: it has been remembered while all...
I am still amazed to recall that everyone I spoke with while researching James Wright: A Life in Poetry could remember the poet so vividly. His physical presence in the room, his astonishing capacity for...
“Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of the Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes. All the proud fathers are ashamed...
How did the Silver Jews have it? Punk rock died when the first kid said /“punk’s not dead”. This may be true of poetry, too. I die a little, in any case, whenever one of those mid-career In Defense Ofs is pubbed, and wouldn’t...
Sloane Crosley is back, returning to the form that made her a household name in really quite a lot of households. With her newest essay collection Look Alive Out There, she...
In her debut essay collection Things That Helped, Jessica Friedmann navigates her recovery from postpartum depression. The essays weave a memoir that touches on class, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as motherhood...
When I was first asked to write on this subject, I imagined discussing what I’ve learned from such poets as Cavafy, Olds, and Bidart, when it comes in particular to the body and desire and where that desire can lead and how to speak...
In classical Chinese paintings, we routinely encounter a phenomenon that is strange and even shocking in terms of Western manners. Alongside the artist's original painting, we find many later additions done by other hands: they are red stamps of different sizes, added by collectors—from...
I was an undergrad, it was my junior year, and a poetry workshop (the teacher was famous and beloved, a darling, and I wanted to be a darling like that (like that? I should say, like her, because she was a person, not an...