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” ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

Disappointment has a placid surface—the word is buttoned-up, its gesture to an inner world prioritizing mild description over emotional urgency, an indication simply that what one wished for went left ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...

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 ...

The Winter issue of The Paris Review opens with “Camouflage,” a story by Adania Shibli, the first line of which nudges us, ominously, toward a much broader picture: “We have nothing to do with what’s ...

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 ...