Is It Story That Makes Us Read?Plots: the who, what, and where — but maybe not why — of literature. Plus, the history of plot and literature’s very worst endings.

Most screenplays use some form of a plot device. But a bad plot device can ruin an otherwise acceptable screenplay, so screenwriters must be careful to craft storytelling devices in a way that ...

Toward the end of “Birnam Wood” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the latest novel from the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton, Rosie Demarney, an otherwise minor character, gets a moment in the spotlight.

To enter Krasznahorkai’s fiction is to surrender to sentences that stretch toward infinity and find, at their limits, a ...

The last time I visited Rebecca in the hospital, in September, 2022, we spent the afternoon researching hospice options and talking about her novel. Rebecca had been working on it for a decade, and ...

Reese Witherspoon's first adult novel began with a familiar writer's muse: a character who refused to be ignored. This ...