March 2021

In the opening moments of King Rocker, a new documentary about the English post-punk musician Robert Lloyd, the comedian Stewart Lee stands at the entrance to...

The collaboration between Germany’s industrial magnates and the Third Reich was a story of mutual exploitation and moral abdication. The electrical parts manufacturer Siemens employed thousands...

For years, I convinced myself I couldn’t grasp the sense of a sentence without paper and ink. The same letters, flashed on a screen, never seemed...

I might argue that the sea is literature’s greatest character, living as she does among the best mysteries ever written. And yet she is modest. She...

Charles Dickens wrote, in his novel David Copperfield, “I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in...

Back in 2012 or so, I discovered FictionPress (the sister site to FanFiction.Net). This was the first major repository of original fiction I’d ever come across,...

I like to joke sometimes that I was a history major in a past life. Or in the middle of the night, when I’m trying to...

Are you in the market for some mystery book club suggestions? Mysteries and thrillers are fun picks for book clubs because they offer plenty of suspense...

What makes a great sex scene in fiction? I checked in with readers, authors, and editors to find what gets readers’ engines revving in romance and...

When Ralph Ellison introduced himself to the 1966 Pen Congress, an international conference for arts and letters, he said: “I am an American novelist. I sometimes...