Gary Indiana in HIS NEW YORK APARTMENT, FEBRUARY 2002. Photograph by SYLVIA PLACHY.

Extracts from forthcoming books by William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, Joyce E. Chaplin, Helen Garner, and Barbara T. Smith.

We are delighted to announce that Elijah Bailey will receive this year’s George Plimpton Prize and that Julien Columeau and ...

What secret desires and resentments are tucked inside the people we love? A little girl’s diary, with its tiny lock and key, ...

mop in Slam sweeping across the floor.

Saint, terrorist, fishwife. Stench that appals. Famines, machine guns, the Great Plague (your sickness), Rending of garments, cries, mass burials. I'd watched my beard sprout in the mirror's grave.

When we had to make things right, we went to the French House. The pub stands on Dean Street, in Soho, in central London, near the Algerian Coffee Stores, where the windows are stocked with Hazer Baba ...

If there’s a trick to writing a libretto, it’s thinking first about what’s happening onstage and not about what characters are saying. With that in mind, I realized early on that since the novel is ...

Plato’s Phaedrus begins at the edge of the city of Athens, in the countryside, as we would say today. Enter Socrates and Phaedrus, his younger friend. Phaedrus has just come from the house of Lysias, ...

While I write this, my husband is cycling through the rain, taking our one-year-old son, who last night yet again wouldn’t sleep, to nursery school, and I am thinking of Tove Ditlevsen’s poems. I, too ...

My very first memory takes place at the local Blockbuster store, where I went one night with my father to rent a movie. I was four or five years old. He let me run ahead of him through the aisles, and ...