Essays

My four-year-old nieces love the picture-book versions of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, which extract small stories from the canon, representing them simply for young readers.

In the throes of Syria’s civil war, one elderly farmer finds a new calling in verse.

Robin Black’s collection of short stories, If I loved you, I would tell you this, was released in March 2010 and earned critical praise and acclaim. It was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor Short Story International Award. And yet Black’s...

The summer after my first year in college, I worked in a paint factory. Packard Paint was a small operation—no more than thirty people worked there—tucked away in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a city of about thirty thousand.

I have come to realize how much I have, throughout my life, bought into the narrative of this alluring myth of personal responsibility and excellence. I realize how much I believe that all good things will come if I—if we—just work hard...

Letters of Note, a five-year-old blog run by Shaun Usher, is now a book. The blog offers correspondence “deserving of a wider audience” (as its tagline runs). When possible, Usher’s blog presents the letters in their original scans...

When literary promise is not enough

The discovery of that kiss changed me. Reading, which had seemed a retreat from the world, was suddenly more vital, dangerous, and necessary.

Does the prospect of love lure a man forward into refuge or is it the inevitable hazard of a lived life? What’s the fair-market worth of the word possibility these days? How tightly is the pursuit of happiness indexed to the commonweal? And...