The best horror fiction accounts for the heart’s profound sensitivity — its vulnerability to alarm and suspense — and the best horror writers understand that the heart, as much as the mind, is able to gauge and comprehend the forces, processes, shadows, and shapes of fear.
This was long before the power and reach of social media, decades before “Black Twitter” became a sounding board for people of color. And yet, by episode three, on the strength of word of mouth alone, there wasn’t a black or Latino teenager I knew who was missing a new Chappelle’s Show every Tuesday night.
Miscellaneous trivia feeds a different part of our selves than an intentionally-crafted story, regardless of length or format -- two minutes or two hours, text-based or visual, GIFs or emojis, ephemeral Snapchats or six-second looped Vine videos.
25 years after its release, 'Subtraction' stands out as a high-wire act of the novel form — taut in expression yet rich with humanity, expertly crafted and unfairly neglected.
New husbands and dads, formerly the street-fighting men of my 20s, stood on patios with plastic monitors clipped to their belts, refusing to answer my questions with anything but swallows of beer.
For years, decades, I did not dream of my father. I thought of him. I resented him occasionally for my imperfect childhood. Never was he in my dreams. Sometimes I wondered why that was. Everyone dreams of the dead, sooner or later.
Who could resist the irony? Donald Trump, the poster boy for capitalist braggadocio, has two of William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” framed on the wall of the library in his Trump International Hotel & Tower.
How can you take me there if the word “loins” is used even once? How can you take me there if you won’t admit that there are smells? And pubic hairs that must occasionally be plucked from the tip of your tongue or hocked up discreetly in the shower sometime later.
In some ways, yearbook camp felt like an extended Tony Robbins seminar. Each morning we met in the auditorium, where one of the staff led us in a group chant to get us fired-up for the day. I am from New Jersey, and only get fired-up for pizza and pork roll sandwiches.
Like many men who pride themselves on their toughness and self-reliance, Hemingway was almost comically insecure and prone to betray anyone who had the effrontery to do him a favor.
As it happened, the doctor had her own creative pursuits on the side: a short story collection that she was paying to have printed by what was known, in literary circles and beyond, as a vanity press.
I’m jealous of every writer who’s written a feature for The Atlantic and of every Paris memoir that’s ever been published, especially the ones that involve a lot of food. I am full of unthinkable jealousies.
Unlike J.M. Barrie or A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll grants no asylum to wistful acknowledgements that childhood must come to an end. The lost laughter of childhood needn’t be lost forever.
The Victorian Angel in the House hasn't died; she has mutated from the quiet, calm keeper of domestic bliss into someone huge and ferocious, working at all costs to keep others safe.
