What makes things interesting to the reader? It depends on the quality of writing and perception—which, I suppose, is what ...

It’s a good time to investigate the paradoxes and special strangeness of Andy Kaufman and Paul Reubens, oddly alike in some ...

Casting Miss World 1994 as the second-prettiest sister would make the metaphysics of their romance totally unrecognizable ...

But Goshen was not an attempt at charity. It was, according to my parents’ interpretation of scripture, a tangible ...

Emma has been called a detective novel, and with good reason: the fun of first reading it consists largely in scrutinizing ...

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Nasser Rabah’s poem “The War Is Over,” translated from the Arabic by Wiam ...

The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience. It was like John ...

I spend the first night in my room with a head cold and fever. I sit in the jacuzzi. I phone James Merrill, as instructed. It is 1993. Rudolf Nureyev is dead from AIDS. I need a job and receive a ...

I was fortunate to have traveled America’s blue highways in the golden age of roadside attractions. The year I fell in love with roadside attractions was 1971, when my husband, Michael, and I (newly ...

I tend not to think that stuff other people think is obvious is obvious. Everyone feels like they have some sense of Frost. Everyone knows a poem or two. That kind of overexposure lends an aspect of ...

Usually, institutional libraries are governed by highly codified policies. Their catalogues are their raison d’être, elegant data structures that facilitate easy circulation and millennial continuity.

Imagine a present-day reader reaching for Philip K. Dick’s 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip in search of transport, out of the here and now to a psychedelically paranoid near-future Mars. This person ...