Essays

Trying to make a living as a book reviewer, the $200 spare-parts book scanner, TriQuarterly’s future, behind the scenes at the Nobel Foundation, and more.

The best way to bolster literature in translation is to buy some, and maybe you’ll get a jump on next year’s Nobel Prize winner.

He has the surname that suggests
a contested kinship: Jefferson—

The Google Books settlement grinds onward, Amazon faces a class-action lawsuit for pushing their BookSurge POD service, great writers posthumous works raise questions, and more.

The first short story collection by the promising Uwem Akpan doesn’t so much celebrate the form as it does the success of gimmickry.

“I’m just a piece of trash from the gutter,” Jesse told me with pride. “I was born to be what I am. I come from a family of hustlers. Most people at family reunions. They talk about their kids and who got married and shit. At my family...

We confused the American Dream with simple accumulation. We spent vastly beyond our means in an attempt to give off a false impression of achievement, and that wild spending of borrowed money drove the current crash.

His writing is devastating in its beauty, evoking West Virginia’s mountain hollows with a sinewy and precise prose that comes as close to Hemingway as anything I’ve ever read.

Here is North Gulfport—
its liquor stores and car washes,

The house is in need of repair, but is—
for now, she says—still hers. After the storm,
she laid hands on what she could reclaim: