By: Jason Grote

In his error, performance art was born.

By: Joshua Glenn

Most of my favorite campus novels — from Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim to, say, Don DeLillo’s White Noise — were penned by a novelist who’d done short time […]

By: David Smay

He helped free science fiction from 19th-century (or any) values.

By: Matthew Battles

JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899–1986). The gaucho stood over the dead man, smeared the blade of his facón across his poncho, and slid it away somewhere within the folds of cloth. The smell of blood already […]

By: Ingrid Schorr

Despite her reputation as the witty gal of the Algonquin Round Table, DOROTHY PARKER (1893-1967) dismissed the clique as “just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were.” They […]

By: Erik Davis

He introduced “outsideness” — cosmic dread — to science fiction.

By: Patrick Cates

Until he was nearly 50, CHARLES BUKOWSKI (1920-94), drinker, womanizer, brawler and writer, cranked out short stories and poetry only in his spare time. These garnered him a reputation for miniatures that accurately and painfully […]

By: Tor Aarestad

In all of her writing and art TOVE JANSSON (1914-2001) paid keen attention to the beauty and detail in the natural world. But the descriptions and illustrations of people (or their fantastical stand-ins: hemulens, fillyjonks, […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Moses was obsessed with micro­organisms like yeast… because God is an alien.

By: Mimi Lipson

Novelist, poet, and newspaper man DON MARQUIS (1878-1937) was once a household name. Now he is mostly remembered for his Archy and Mehitabel story-poems. Because they are about creatures (a cockroach and an alley cat, […]

By: Lucy Sante

JOSEPH MITCHELL (1908-96) arrived in New York City from rural North Carolina the day after the stock market crashed in 1929. Following a few years as a newspaper reporter, he went to work for the […]

By: Tor Aarestad

In 1927, ELIAS CANETTI (1905-94) threw himself into a Viennese crowd protesting an acquittal in a murder trial. The crowd went on to burn down the Palace of Justice, and Canetti’s feeling of selflessness and […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The most dangerous game?

By: Erik Davis

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the 18th lord of the Irish barony of Dunsany, hunted big game in Africa and played champion chess. As LORD DUNSANY (1878-1957), he also wrote, without revising, a prodigious number […]

By: James Parker

John Mortimer, the barrister who successfully defended Last Exit To Brooklyn, a novel by HUBERT SELBY JR. (1928-2004), against an obscenity charge in a ’60s British courtroom, would do the same ten years later for […]