Book
Story Stream
Pity the Child April 04, 2023
About a decade ago, toddler son in tow, I found myself in a playground for the first time in 35 years. It was not what I remembered. The colors were far more vibrant. Plastic had replaced wood and metal. Sharp edges had been rounded, chains and hinge...
The Unbearable Costs of Becoming a Writer April 04, 2023
My parents didn’t understand my job. At least, not in its entirety. If asked, they might tell people that their daughter was a writer. They were both avid readers who read my first book and many of my stories; once, when I visited them, I found a new...
The Thought Police Come for Miss Marple April 04, 2023
I happen to belong to that small group of Agatha Christie devotees who believe that the great English mystery writer not only told a good yarn but conveyed genuine and enduring wisdom about human nature and the struggle between good and evil in the h...
E.E.. Cummings Libertarian Utopia April 04, 2023
Exactly a century after it first appeared, E.E. Cummings' novel The Enormous Room has been republished, reminding us that its author may have been the most profoundly libertarian writer in American literature. Beginning as a critic of authoritarian s...
"This Is Not Miami" by Fernanda Melchor April 03, 2023
Set in and around the Mexican city of Veracruz, This Is Not Miami delivers a series of devastating stories—spiraling from real events—that bleed together reportage and the author’s rich and rigorous imagination.These narrative nonfiction pieces probe...
Old Ideas, New Dawn April 03, 2023
Some books may fairly be called intimidating. They seem to attest to their own authority and almost defy the reader to question their judgments. Such a work is “The Reopening of the Western Mind” by the English historian Charles Freeman, an account o...
A Portrait of Leonard Cohen as a Young Artist April 03, 2023
One legend about Leonard Cohen goes like this: It’s the early 1970s, and the Canadian musician and poet is performing in Jerusalem. As was his custom at the time, he and his band are on a tremendous amount of mescaline. He feels self-conscious and fe...
Why Babies Cry April 03, 2023
There is a hole at the center of the universe and of history. In the heart of man is a void, a “primal fear,” something that is “always there,” lurking, “awaiting your concession,” “awaiting your indulgence,” the idea of loss itself. We are always an...
On George Saunders’ 'Liberation Day' April 03, 2023
“You are trapped in you,” a voice says in “The Mom of Bold Action,” the second of nine stories in George Saunders’ fifth collection, Liberation Day. It’s spoken by said unnamed mom, but she’s doing a bit of ventriloquism here, giving another characte...
The Art of the Subtle Ending March 30, 2023
[Spoiler alert: I’ve tried my best to avoid it here, but some of the descriptions in this article may spoil the ending of the films mentioned.]Just minutes before the end of the film, I had high hopes for Promising Young Woman, the 2020 film that is ...
Welcome to Brandon Sanderson's Fantasy Empire March 30, 2023
“This is my dream,” Brandon Sanderson says.We’re 30 feet beneath the surface of northern Utah, in a room that feels like a cross between a five-star hotel lobby and a Bond villain’s secret base. My ears popped on the way down. Sanderson points to the...
Pynchon’s Prophecy March 30, 2023
One of the few photographic traces of the famously reclusive author Thomas Pynchon is a picture taken in 1965 outside of his apartment at 217 33rd Street, Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles County. Outside the front door with a pig-shaped piñata is his fri...
Shelf Life: Clint Smith March 30, 2023
Seven years after his debut Counting Descent, Clint Smith releases his second poetry collection, Above Ground (Little, Brown), which reflects on how fatherhood has altered how he perceives and engages with the world. In between collections, he wrote ...
The Most Famous California Novel You’ve Never Heard Of March 30, 2023
The Barbara Worth Country Club is a par-71, 6,500-yard golf course that spreads out on the fringes of Holtville, in California’s Imperial Valley. Like many desert golf courses, it has an apparitional quality: a square of deep green gleams against a s...
On the 'Banned Books' People March 30, 2023
Did you know that the 1619 Project is a banned book? This might surprise you, given that it has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, has a Hulu original series, and that governments everywhere are paying the author tens of thousands of dollars to sp...
America’s Ancestor Obsession March 30, 2023
Genealogy – the records of descent, the pedigrees of mortals and gods, of genos, race, kind and offspring – is one of the great feats of the human imagination: a vast collection of stories, both intimate and cosmic, that bind the living to the dead ...
How AI Could Save Liberal Education March 29, 2023
The following is a condensed version of "How AI Could Save Liberal Education" by Lee Trepanier, published at Law & Liberty. There have been discussions about AI writing programs like ChatGPT in the academy. The past few months have seen a flurry of a...
Victor LaValle Is Reimagining the Western March 29, 2023
Certain writers are synonymous with their own pocket of the world. Steinbeck and the Salinas Valley; Stephen King and Maine; Zadie Smith writes about London with a texture that few can match. Victor LaValle, for his part, is a New York City writer. I...
Emma Cline Gets Vulnerable on the Page March 29, 2023
Emma Cline’s writing career took off in 2014 when, at age 25, she sold her debut novel, The Girls, to Random House in a seven-figure deal. Back then, Cline’s main credentials were an MFA—she had just graduated from Columbia—and a Plimpton Prize from ...
Spring Break Forever March 29, 2023
Spring Breakers was the first significant feature film released by A24, the independent film production company that has become one of the most influential forces in film, founded by three veterans of a multinational investment bank. One of its signa...
Wokeness Is Not a Politics March 29, 2023
You might have noticed that over the last week or so, half the world’s paid and unpaid commentators have suddenly started putting out their own boutique definition of wokeness. Since the precise definition of wokeness is, in 2023, about as relevant a...
Where Are All the Good Books on Sex? March 29, 2023
Polly Barton’s new work from the garlanded literary publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions is entitled Porn: An Oral History. This may come as a surprise to those familiar with her prize-winning debut, Fifty Sounds, a memoir of her study of the Japanese lan...
Spokesman for Liberalism March 29, 2023
Now 86, Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the world’s greatest living novelists. He has received all the honors to prove it: a Nobel Prize in literature, a Miguel de Cervantes Prize (the Spanish-speaking world’s highest literary award), and election to th...
Why I Became a Time Lord March 29, 2023
Odell is a writer about whose prior work, How to Do Nothing, I have decidedly mixed feelings. It starts promisingly enough: the opening line, “Nothing is harder to do than nothing”, is, as the kids say, a “banger”. But it soon becomes clear that Odel...
Why Did Slavoj Žižek Become So Popular? March 29, 2023
t’s not quite right to think of Slavoj Žižek as a mere theorist; he is closer, in line with Parisian haute langue, to an “event.” As well as the numerous books he’s written, there are dozens about him. There is a journal devoted to Žižek, a Žižek dic...
