David Backer, who runs Fiction Daily and is a contributing editor at this site, recently told me that he occasionally describes our site to people “as the Jimmy Fallon of online literary magazines.” I’m still not sure quite what to make of this, but I’ve slowly come around to the idea — I may not […]
We’re introducing a new series in which we showcase pictures of our editors looking vaguely like a famous author! Jesse Montgomery as Thomas Pynchon! Amanda Shubert as Marilynne Robinson! Eric Jett as Jonathan Swift! Max Rivlin-Nadler as Barbara Kingsolver! Nika Knight as Lorrie Moore! Actually, this is probably the only time this will happen. A […]
The Prosperity Gospel of Oscar Wao
Or how reading Junot Diaz will teach us to pull ourselves up and out of the ongoing economic apocalypse. Just kidding. Second-rate jokes aside, Dean Bakopoulous’s piece in the Wall Street Journal, How Reading Junot Diaz Can Help America Prosper, is as moving and insightful a moral argument for fiction I’ve read in quite a […]
A Reading List from Donald Barthelme
I’ve been drawn to lists of books that authors recommend for about as long as I’ve been taking fiction seriously. Over time, this interest has evolved into something critical — a study of taste and influence — but when it began it was pretty mystical: I think some part of me felt that if I […]
We’ll be using this space for posting and commenting on links, making short observations about what we’re reading, dispatches from readings and book parties and worlds outside literature (i.e. art, film, and television), funny things we think when we’re riding the subway, lists of our favorite KISS albums (Alive! tops the list, duh), twitter feeds […]