During my graduate studies at Oxford, I became friends with a group of people of Waughian tendencies, Russophiles to whom admitting that you spoke no Russian and had not ridden the Trans-Siberian Railway made you a pariah.

I used my earnings from the bookstore to purchase a plane ticket. A few months later I boarded a plane, hailed a taxi, scheduled a shuttle, and at last reached Ray Bradbury’s front door.

If a literary magazine is paying you for your work, they are likely doing so out of grant money, not pockets deeply lined by the publishing of literary fiction and poetry.

Centenaries ask us to put aside our doubts and pay tribute; that said, the fact that these texts have lain dormant for years is not wholly without reason.

Mary Gaitskill comes alive when turning toward what others shun.

In “The Philosophy of Composition," Poe is critiquing Poe with the objectivity of a scientist studying a specimen under a microscope.

If we accept the premise that editors will continue printing, then the question isn’t “Is print dead?” but rather: what should print do to distinguish itself from digital?

Joan Didion is an extraordinarily gifted and prescient writer whose enterprise seems to me to be poisoned by something that may or not be fatal: she can be cloyingly precious.

Gunn lived much of his life by the principle of free love: a deliberate transcendence of socially prescribed coupling practices.

Gorey’s illustrations give off a sense of hopelessness and terror. Very often they perfectly match and heighten scenes from the novels.

The vows columns might note that 'The Believer' and Las Vegas share a certain weirdness. A wedding toast might say that bringing indie culture to the ultimate resort town is a great McSweeneyian adventure. I’m excited for it because Las Vegas is always troubled, always relevant, and so an ideal place for the literati to set-up a magazine bureau.