Anne Enright’s new novel suggests something simple—family, for good or ill, keeps forming us even when we try to escape it—but her prose constantly surprises.
Langdon Hammer’s biography of poet and writer James Merrill is “wholly definitive” in scope, and threaded throughout with Merrill’s brilliant, always enlivening wit.
Iranian author Azar Nafiri defends the value of canonical American literature—its imagination and humanity—against Common Core, market analyses, and Babbitt.
The award-winning author of the story collection ‘Night at the Fiestas’ talks about her influences, the importance of empathy in fiction, and washing altar cloths.
Mailer, Trilling, Macdonald, Kazin, Maxwell, Bellow, Auden, O’Hara—men with public moral concerns, who seized power to shape American literature. But who were they?
Baxter reads fiction to “see bad stuff happening.” He writes characters who get into serious trouble, and face their own “human wreckage” at someone else’s request.
Through the eyes of a middle-aged alcoholic grandson of an Auschwitz survivor, Michel Raub’s fifth novel contemplates the infinite ways humans torment each other.
What sort of a fugitive am I, living in a two-car garage, that old temple of middle-class respectability? Simon almost sneered: You’re not exactly Anne Frank.
By watching and listening and, most of all, by writing, Andre Dubus continues to celebrate the human spirit in which it is possible to see the power of God and God’s grace at work.
