Meet S. J. Perelman, the “writer’s writer” who was audacious, original, and funny
Ben Yagoda: Presenting an O. Henry for the twenty-first century
Larry Lockridge: Why it’s time to reassess Mary Jane Ward’s The Snake Pit
“You’re not reading your grandfather’s short story”— Charles McGrath on the fiction of Donald Barthelme
“Engaging, embracing, confiding, and humane”—David Quammen on the work of E. O. Wilson
Endpapers: A family story about books, belonging, and the bloodlands of 20th-century Europe
The worlds of Octavia E. Butler: “There’s real danger in these stories”
Nicholas Lemann: Challenges to American democracy are “ever-present”
Robert W. Trogdon on Ernest Hemingway’s Paris years, “a magical time for modern literature”
Roads not taken: Andrew H. Miller discusses On Not Being Someone Else
Ron Hansen on the Western, a “distinctly American mythology”
Ruth Franklin on the novels of Shirley Jackson: “She never did the same thing twice”
New life of John Steinbeck reveals a writer “fueled by anger”
Sean Wilentz: Richard Hofstadter and the “paranoid style” as an American phenomenon
The Saddest Words: Michael Gorra on reading Faulkner now
Susan Ware: Race, region, and the full story of the fight for women’s suffrage
