Notes from a Literary Lad
From Granta 141: Canada Lisa Moore’s essential métier has always been the short story. She has branched out in recent years, publishing novels and books for young adults, but none has compared in stylistic acumen or narrative interest to her
From Aetherial Worlds Of the Russian masters to whom she has been compared – including Leo Tolstoy, a distant relative – the one that Tatyana Tolstaya most closely resembles is Nikolai Gogol. Both authors have an affinity for the uncanny
From Compulsory Games The English writer Robert Aickman is the model of a cult author. He is generally considered a genre writer, although that is reductive. The conventions of the horror genre with which he is most frequently associated are
From Heads of the Colored People Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s “Suicide, Watch,” is essentially a shaggy dog story with one of the most mordantly funny punch lines in recent memory. But, like most comic stories, its thematic subject matter is highly serious:
From Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction In 1954, Richard Matheson published a story called “Dance of the Dead.” A post-apocalyptic vision set after a devastating Third World War, the story involves four teenagers taking a road trip to St. Louis
From Counternarratives Mark Twain’s 1884 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a foundational text in American literature. It has been read, dissected, discussed, and disparaged more intensely than pretty much any other work of American fiction. No less a
From Florida “In all genres, I wait in ambush for the exact, perfect, telling detail, the thing that makes the scene or line come alive.” That is what Lauren Groff told The New York Times in response to the question,
From Catastrophe and Other Stories The great literary chronicler of bureaucratic nightmares is Franz Kafka, whose novels The Trial and The Castle, along with stories such as “In the Penal Colony,” present the mechanisms of modern industrial statehood as horrifying,
From Goodbye, Columbus From the beginning, Philip Roth seemed to court controversy. Whether it was feminists railing against his supposed misogyny, puritans scandalized by his frank depictions of sex and his rampant use of profanity, or intimate partners who felt
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating