Staff Picks: Tell Me A Riddle

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By the twelfth and last page, I was in tears. “I Stand Here Ironing” is a story about a working mother, but to call it that — even to call it the best story ever written about a working mother — feels reductive. Work-life balance may now be the stuff of Atlantic cover stories and Lean In, but in 1961, exploring it in fiction was a downright radical act
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A Year in Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg

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I did something crazy this year. I blew half of a freelancing check on the complete, seven-volume edition of William T. Vollmann's 3,000 page essay on violence, Rising Up and Rising Down.
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Outside the Ring: A Profile of Sergio De La Pava

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And if a book this good was consigned to XLibris, it meant one (or more) of three things. 1) Literary trade publishing was more gravely ill than I’d imagined; 2) My judgment was way off-base (always a possibility), or 3) There was some piece of this story I was still missing.
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The Literary Pedigree of Downton Abbey

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The current PBS Masterpiece series mashes the "class" buttons hard, in both the literary and the economic senses. But its relationship with the English novel is more complicated than it might appear.
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A Year in Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg

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Behold: a museum of my failures, an atlas of incompletion, a tour of the ruins of a future that never came. I call it "Reviews I Did Not Write This Year."
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