The only letter I’ve ever sent to the New York Times was in the 1980s, objecting to the paper’s suddenly pestilent use of “draconian.” During Iran–Contra the complaint must have seemed trivial; the ...

Snow fell all day while a baby was dying. I cannot remember if it was a boy or a girl, so imagine a girl. This was years ago now. The baby had pneumonia. A few weeks into a tenuous life, her lungs ...

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.” Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told and acquired a ...

Gene Hackman was Popeye Doyle, the Reverend Scott, Lex Luthor, Royal Tenenbaum. He was Little Bill Daggett and John Herod. He was a senator and a president. He was Harry Caul and Harry Moseby and Max ...

Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio from The Silence by Don DeLillo, read by Laurie Anderson, Jeremy Bobb, Marin Ireland, Robin Miles, Jay O. Sanders and ...

The story begins, as so many do, with a journey. In this case, it’s a seemingly simple one: a young girl, cloaked in red, must carry a basket of food through the woods to her bedridden grandmother.

No one is entirely sure when magical penis loss first came to Africa. One early incident was recounted by Dr. Sunday Ilechukwu, a psychiatrist, in a letter some years ago to the Transcultural ...

The moment I lost my fertility I started searching for a baby. At age thirty-one, after almost two decades of chronic pain caused by endometriosis and its little-studied ravages, I had my uterus, my ...

In the spring of 2017, for the first time since publishing a memoir set at the height of San Francisco’s AIDS epidemic, I summoned the nerve to teach a course on memoir—which is to say, at least as I ...

I recently spent a semester teaching writing at an elite liberal-arts college. At strategic points around the campus, in shades of yellow and green, banners displayed the following pair of texts. The ...

The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan. Scribner. 352 pages. $28. After a night of partying, two of Lizzie’s closest friends went swimming in the East River, and one was carried away by a current and ...

The idea that literature contains multitudes is not new. For the greater part of its history, lit(t)eratura referred to any writing formed with letters. Up until the eighteenth century, the only true ...