For several years when I was growing up, my family drove to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In Ashland, the main ...

Door bells,” Barbara Guest said, divorcing the compound with a pause. The poem was simple, startling, one minute long. In the ...

Nebraska is a stubby gay bildungsroman that tracks an amputee named Craig Mullen, our narrator, from his bedridden preteens ...

Just writing what happens, and knowing a lot of it won’t work and that what works will work not because of technique, mainly, ...

The United States is a lyric nation. It has a geography suited to epic, and an expanse suited to epic, but it is organized in a lyric way—organizationally, the United States has more in common with ...

But she sees “up close, oh, their soft faces and special haircuts, their pimples, their nascent moustaches.” The specter of suburban violence, a persistent concern of Garner’s work, hangs over “our” ...

Who hasn’t had a boss, supervisor, or mentor worthy of complaint? The first person I worked for, who was white, was in the habit of calling me “weak.” Her boss’s boss, also white, one day gave a ...

Mary Stuart was six days old when she became the Queen of Scotland. Her precious body was guarded from that moment onward, moved like a pawn on a chessboard from one castle to another. Maybe the ...

Ernst Gombrich, likely the most influential art historian of the twentieth century, is ripe for revisiting. His outlook on what constituted important art was white, elite, male, and Eurocentric. In ...

Everybody in the New Wave–nostalgia hotel has their phones out, which makes me pretty much like everybody else. After breezing past the lobby desk, I peek around: slate colors, fresh leather. There ...

An encounter with Emerson’s essays. This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as ...

On a stretch of rural road not far from my house, there is a small wood where, once a year, for just a few short and cold days, the ground turns a magnificent shade of purple. In a reversal of ...