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Sanora Babb

The Woman Who Would Be Steinbeck

John Steinbeck beat Sanora Babb to the great American Dust Bowl novel—using her field notes. What do we owe her today?
by Mark Athitakis via The Atlantic on October 10, 2024
National Book Award seal.

How Historical Fiction Redefined the Literary Canon

In contemporary publishing, novels fixated on the past rather than the present have garnered the most attention and prestige.
by Alexander Manshel via The Nation on September 11, 2024
partner

Books That Speak of Books

How a subgenre of murder mysteries plays with the way real history is written.
by Emma Garman via HNN on September 10, 2024
partner

A Nice, Provocative Silence

The author of "Cahokia Jazz" reflects on the similarities between historical fiction and science fiction, and the imaginative space opened by archival silences.
by Francis Spufford, Devin Thomas O’Shea via HNN on August 13, 2024
A pixellated landscape of buildings, spaceships, and the moon form the background of the coverpage for this article, titled "How Sci-Fi Worlds Have Changed WIth Us"

Who Killed the World?

Explore science fiction worlds from the last few decades – and what these fictional settings tell us about ourselves.
by Alvin Chang via The Pudding on July 12, 2024
Cover of "James" by Percival Everett.

Kierkegaard on the Mississippi 

Percival Everett refashions a Mark Twain classic.
by Zain Khalid via Bookforum on July 2, 2024
Victorian telegraph operator.

What Mark Zuckerberg Should Learn From 19th-Century Telegraph Operators

No, really.
by Megan Ward via Slate on May 27, 2024
Longshoremen on their lunch hour at the San Francisco docks.

Jack London, "Martin Eden" and The Liberal Education in US life

In Jack London’s novel, Martin Eden personifies debates still raging over the role and purpose of education in American life.
by Nick Romeo via Aeon on May 3, 2024
Séance with spirit manifestation, 1872, by John Beattie.

Immortalizing Words

Henry James, spiritualism, and the afterlife.
by Ashley C. Barnes via The Hedgehog Review on April 30, 2024
partner

Tunnel Vision

When you dig beyond all purpose, digging becomes the purpose.
by Daniel Lavery via HNN on March 26, 2024
Cover of "James" by Percival Everett

Gulp Fiction, or Into the Missouri-verse

On Percival Everett’s “James.”
by Matt Seybold via Cleveland Review of Books on March 25, 2024

The Great American Novels

136 books that made America think.
via The Atlantic on March 14, 2024
Girls reading "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."

Betty Smith Enchanted a Generation of Readers with ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’

No other 20th-century American novel did quite so much to burnish Brooklyn’s reputation.
by Rachel Gordan via The Conversation on February 27, 2024
A hand-drawn, slightly abstract image of a pink typewriter, using a QWERTY keyboard.

Page Against the Machine

Dan Sinykin’s history of corporate fiction.
by Mitch Therieau via Bookforum on February 6, 2024
Jewish moneylender choking debtor

"A Fiendish Fascination"

The representation of Jews in antebellum popular culture reveals that many Americans found them both cartoonishly villainous and enticingly exotic.
by David S. Reynolds via New York Review of Books on February 1, 2024
Collage of African Americans' faces.

Specters of the Mythic South

How plantation fiction fixed ghost stories to Black Americans.
by Alena Pirok via Southern Cultures on January 24, 2024
A pink, fluffy cloud raining colorful cubes, reminiscent of pieces of data.

What Do We Owe? Generosity, Attribution, and the Perilous Invisibility of Research Infrastructure

Attribution can make visible the vast infrastructure of research and display how much hard-won knowledge, including creative endeavor, it has faciliated.
by Karin Wulf via The Scholarly Kitchen on January 18, 2024
Bud Schulberg testifying before HUAC.

During the 2023 Writers Strike, This Book Helped Me Understand the Depravities of Hollywood

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.
by Alex N. Press via Jacobin on December 8, 2023
Painting by Pablo Ventura called "War Souvenirs #9" depicting a soldier kissing a woman, another with a bicycle, and World War II propaganda posters.

Writing Under Fire

For a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding.
by Nathaniel Rich via New York Review of Books on November 30, 2023
Illustration of multiple people drawing the same cover of a book

Big Publishing Killed the Author

How corporations wrested creative control from writers and editors—to produce less interesting books.
by Scott Wasserman Stern via The New Republic on November 15, 2023
A photograph of Louisa May Alcott.

Nonfiction That Rivals Little Women: The Forgotten Essays of Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott is best known for Little Women, but she earned her first taste of celebrity as an essayist.
by Liz Rosenberg via Literary Hub on October 24, 2023
Captain Lightfood on horseback firing a pistol.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot: The American Creation of Irish Outlaw Folk Heroes

Martin’s confession relates outlaw adventures that appear to be original. But were they real? 
by Jerry Kuntz via Commonplace on August 8, 2023
Tennessee Williams

How Thomas Lanier Williams Became Tennessee

A collection of previously unpublished stories offers a portrait of the playwright as a young artist.
by Casey N. Cep via The New Yorker on July 3, 2023
Illustrated portrait of Don DeLillo against a firey background.

Secret Histories

Don DeLillo's Cold Wars.
by Siddhartha Deb via The Nation on June 26, 2023
Cormac McCarthy.

Cormac McCarthy’s Unforgiving Parables of American Empire

He demonstrated how the frontier wasn’t an incubator of democratic equality but a place of unrelenting pain, cruelty, and suffering.
by Greg Grandin via The Nation on June 21, 2023
The cover of The Black Mask magazine, June 1, 1923, featuring a hooded Klan member.

The Gumshoes Who Took On the Klan

In the pages of "Black Mask" magazine, the Continental Op and Race Williams fought the KKK even as they shared its love of vigilante justice.
by Matthew Wills via JSTOR Daily on May 24, 2023
Daguerreotype of a young woman, with her head resting on her hand.

In Love with a Daguerreotype

A nineteenth-century twist on love at first sight.
by Julia Case-Levine via Lapham’s Quarterly on May 15, 2023
original

Pieces of the Past

Dispatches from a spine-tingling day of visits to the places where James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Thomas Cole created their most famous works.
by Ed Ayers on March 15, 2023
Diagram with three mollusks

Edgar Allan Poe: Pioneering Mollusk Scientist

Poe’s work reminds us that the separation of “Arts” and “Sciences” into discrete discourses of knowledge is itself a quite recent invention.
by James D. Lilley via Commonplace on November 1, 2022
Black and white photo of Lydia Maria Child reading a book

Living in Words

A new biography explores the work of the influential abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who wrote about the social, political, and cultural issues of her time.
by Brenda Wineapple via New York Review of Books on October 13, 2022
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