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 a lyric way—organizationally, the United States has more in common with ...

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 ...

Doodling today is not what it was. Or is it? Google “doodle” and you’ll find the Google Doodle—what Google calls a “fun, surprising, and sometimes spontaneous” transformation of its logo by a team of ...

Rainer Maria Rilke and the Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker met in the summer of 1900 in the German artists’ colony of Worpswede, which lies to the north of Bremen in a flat, windswept ...

This morning, before breakfast, I played nineteen games of Scrabble on my phone. I won thirteen. It took less than an hour. Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve played Scrabble every day, ...

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 ...