O ne night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact ...

Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...

Sheila and I were best friends from age ten to thirteen. I lived four blocks from our grade school and she two. She’d wait for me to pass her house in the morning and then we’d fall in step as we ...

Ninety minutes west of Boston, up the road from a Benedictine monastery, lies what is perhaps the most studied forest on Earth. Since 1907, when the first of these 3,850 acres of black oak and red ...

Discussed in this essay: Collected Works, by Charles Portis. Library of America. 1,105 pages. $45. Not long before Charles Portis visited Buckingham Palace in the summer of 1964, having secured a rare ...

One of the scenes the M.A.S. most loves in its cinematic corpus is an homage to Marilynity performed by Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I’m talking of course about the musical number in the ...

When the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and a mask. This was a ...

It has inspired Stephen King’s novella “The Langoliers,” and Tom Perrotta’s novel The Leftovers, which was made into one of the best TV series of the century, not to mention Tim LaHaye and Jerry B.

Discussed in this essay: A Girl’s Story, by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer. Seven Stories Press. 160 pages. $18.95. A Man’s Place, by Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie. Seven ...

Twenty-five years ago, the philosopher Richard Rorty accomplished something many writers aspire to but few ever pull off: he predicted the future. Toward the end of his 1998 book Achieving Our Country ...

T here’s a new definition of literature in town. It has been slouching toward us for some time now but may have arrived officially in 2009, with the publication of Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’s A ...

Discussed in this essay: The Hero of This Book, by Elizabeth McCracken. Ecco. 224 pages. $26.99. In 1996, upon my arrival in the United States, I attended a university orientation for international ...