As soon becomes apparent, The Dream of the Great American Novel simply isn’t aimed at the common reader or even at many uncommon ones. The grateful audience for this book will be other scholars and teachers of American literature, who will...
A holiday tradition in the Netherlands involving blackface has sparked a debate about race, the legacy of slavery, and the vestiges of colonialism. Emily Raboteau told the story in our Winter 2014 magazine.
It would be easy to dismiss Slab City as a trailer park at the end of the world, but that would miss the spirit of the place, the ambition of the people who live there.
My new boss, Chick, was a morbidly obese manic off his meds who hailed from a tiny town I’d never heard of—Wassily, Louisiana—a town so small, Chick claimed, the shotgun shacks only had space for pistols. In summers, he told me, you...