fiction

Power and choice in the 1930s novel.

On the history of literature masquerading as primary source.

John A. Williams’s unsung novel.

In every generation, writers and readers find new ways to plumb the depths of Herman Melville and his work.

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, novels were regarded as the video games or TikTok of their age — shallow, addictive, and dangerous.

A conversation with Richard Jean So about combining data and literary analysis to understand how the publishing industry came to be dominated by white writers. 

(And what everyone read instead.)

A major black novelist made a remarkable début. How did he disappear?

No, really.

In Jack London’s novel, Martin Eden personifies debates still raging over the role and purpose of education in American life.

When you dig beyond all purpose, digging becomes the purpose.

136 books that made America think.

No other 20th-century American novel did quite so much to burnish Brooklyn’s reputation.

Dan Sinykin’s history of corporate fiction.

The representation of Jews in antebellum popular culture reveals that many Americans found them both cartoonishly villainous and enticingly exotic.

How plantation fiction fixed ghost stories to Black Americans.

Attribution can make visible the vast infrastructure of research and display how much hard-won knowledge, including creative endeavor, it has faciliated.

A 1941 novel by a former Communist Party member about the dog-eat-dog scumbaggery of movie executives and the lying and artless bragging that Hollywood runs on.

For a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding.

How corporations wrested creative control from writers and editors—to produce less interesting books.