Category Archives: Literature

The books in the Nelson house stood open to the children. A girl could pull Valley of the Dolls off one shelf and Emma off the next, and no one stopped her. Both parents taught literature at Wichita State University. … Continue reading →

The foxes pace behind the wire in the back lots of the Laidlaw farm outside Wingham, Ontario, and the smell of them carries to the house. Robert Laidlaw raises them for their pelts, then mink, then gives up the pens … Continue reading →

Grace Paley (1922-2007) reshaped the American short story by showing that ordinary talk could carry the heaviest emotional and moral freight. She published three collections of stories across more than four decades, and those three slim books changed what American … Continue reading →

Lorrie Moore (b. 1957) ranks among the leading American fiction writers of the past four decades. Her reputation rests on the short story, the form she has refined across four collections and forty years, though her novels and her criticism … Continue reading →

Richard Russo (b. July 15, 1949) stands among the leading American novelists of working-class life and small-town decline. His fiction tracks the inner lives of ordinary people caught between economic stagnation, family obligation, and the receding promise of postwar America. … Continue reading →

Melvin Jules Bukiet (born 1953) is an American novelist, short-story writer, anthologist, and critic. His fiction returns to the same ground across four decades: the Holocaust and what it does to the people born after it, Jewish identity stripped of … Continue reading →

Jonathan Ames (b. March 23, 1964) writes across novels, essays, comics, television, and film, and he treats each form as a way to turn his own embarrassments into literature. He works the border between memoir and invention and keeps that … Continue reading →

Steve Almond (b. 1966) is an American writer whose work crosses fiction, memoir, literary criticism, political commentary, and the craft of writing itself. He has published twelve books across more than three decades and built a reputation for confessional candor … Continue reading →

Karen E. Bender (b. 1963) is an American novelist and short story writer whose fiction examines the moral pressures of middle-class American life. Her subjects include money, illness, marriage, parenthood, environmental fear, and the costs that ordinary decisions impose on … Continue reading →