All Essays

• Paperback Writers: Rudyard Kipling

  Kipling is a fundamentally dark writer.

  Aug 27, 2011

• Books That Made Us: Charlotte’s Web

  Sometimes a book comes along and you feel so lucky that somebody pressed it into your hands to read that you read it right away.

  Aug 24, 2011

• Still Hungry

  On Ben Lerner's "Leaving the Atocha Station."

  Aug 23, 2011

• Letter from London: Soot and Ash

  Once you begin to look for influences, they seem to be everywhere — in the weather, in politics, in literature and art.

  Aug 22, 2011

• Cut and Paste and Run

  So, I find myself wondering, what am I going to do about the man who I think plagiarized me?

  Aug 20, 2011

• Wunderkind

  on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s unlikely career in television.

  Aug 18, 2011

• In the Charles Wright Museum

  All around me were Charles’s lines and poems: his deck, the shrubs and flowers, the weather and hillside, and the Pacific below were all characters.

  Aug 12, 2011

• Year of the Fire Cock

  The book is so unrelentingly erotic and explicit that it could, if you're not careful, cause chafing.

  Aug 9, 2011

• Exile on Fleet Street

  Today, the mesmeric hold that Rupert Murdoch came to exercise over British public life has been broken.

  Aug 8, 2011

• Future Tense

  "Yes," said a Frenchman. "We have this silly theory in France that our authors should be able to eat."

  Aug 6, 2011

• Martin Beck Has a Cold

  The police procedural is rich with political implications, a feature fundamental to Sjöwall and Wahlöö's literary accomplishment.

  Aug 5, 2011

• Good Germans: On Heinrich Böll

  What happens in Heinrich Böll's novels, and why am I calling them experimental?

  Aug 3, 2011
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  Why to Take Notes

  Things Iowa Workshop Writers Say

  Kevin BrockmeierJul 30, 2011
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  Model Villages, Short Stories, and Other Miniatures

  When it comes to trying to make a piece of fiction, scaling down is an essential strategy. The world has "scalability" in spades.

  Geoff NicholsonJul 25, 2011
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  Autumn of the Empire

  If you spot in the financial crisis something of the epic, you are not mistaken.

  Joshua CloverJul 18, 2011
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  The Ghost of Wrath

  Harrison Gray Otis: a biography in progress.

  Mike DavisJul 15, 2011