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 […]

By: Lucy Sante

If CHESTER HIMES (1909-84) hadn’t found himself broke in France in the mid-1950s he might today be remembered only as the author of some acute, painful treatments of racism and prison life — the kind […]

By: Tom Nealon

Before NORTHROP FRYE (1912-91) there was no Literary Theory, only criticism. He blasted a place for the former, as a distinct field of study — first with Fearful Symmetry (1947) and then decisively with Anatomy […]

By: Erik Davis

Smith explored the inner landscapes opened up by postwar mind science.

By: James Parker

The castle of consciousness, turret and coign, too huge for the human head, where stalk the battlements, robed and forbidding, the super-intelligent dead, has terrible deeps and horrible heights, and walls that are wondrous thick, […]

By: Jason Grote

The biography of ROBERT A. HEINLEIN (1907-88) firmly places Golden-Age SF on the grand continuum of Americana: the no-nonsense engineer’s mentality of his Kansas City upbringing, his longing for military service (he graduated from the […]

By: Patrick Cates

Patrick C. stared in silent disbelief at the bureaucrat who sat on the other side of the desk. Eventually he gathered himself and spoke in an exasperated plea: “You want me to write 150 words […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The secret origins of Generation Y

By: Lucy Sante

“They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” The celebrated first line of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) by JAMES M. CAIN (1892-1977) tersely illustrates his verbal and narrative economy as well as […]