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My new novel, Welcome to Braggsville, is a satire about four college kids who perform an "intervention" at a Civil War reenactment, and quickly discover that even the best of intentions can cause a world of hurt as they find themselves caught between the academic theories that have stoked their indignation and the harsh realities [...]

Why are people so interested in drunk writers? Recently I was sent a very interesting nonfiction book, The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, by Olivia Laing, for a review. I couldn't review it. It's an anecdotal study of several American writers, including John Berryman, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver (all [...]

I was asleep on the floor of the magicians' apartment. Not one, but three magicians lived there, and their mysterious, mischievous, and sometimes macabre props surrounded my living-room floor futon. A straitjacket hung on the coat rack, a mini-guillotine sat over the fireplace, a mechanical monkey poked out from behind the couch, and an artificial [...]

Gardens do not wait. Weeds grow and flowers wilt. In the days and weeks following my father's death, my parents' garden continued to flourish and demand our attention, for plants do not know grief. When it came to our garden, my parents were a team. My father — dyslexic, spatial thinker, and dreamer — looked [...]

I found a hole in the perimeter fence on a Sunday when the haul trucks were idle and I could work my way up the shoulder of mountain undetected. About 100 yards from the site rim, I came into a collar of dying trees — leaves dusted with grey mountain gilings, a forest floor of [...]

Late at night on September 22, 2014, at a housing project basketball court in Brooklyn, a white cop pushes a black man against a chain link fence. They stand face-to-face, the black man, Lamard Joye, a little taller than the cop, William Montemarino. Joye wears a hooded sweatshirt, printed collage-style with pictures of the Notorious [...]

Things were changing in our household: the teen years had intruded into our otherwise harmonious, do-as-mom-tells-you relatively orderly world. As my two sons, who are two years apart, gradually began the "morphing" process from childhood into adolescence, I felt many things shift, most obviously our parent-child relationship. We were not unusual: this was happening in [...]

Fairy tale is a country of the mind where there are many inhabitants stretching back into deep time, and we're like people before Babel, we speak a common tongue: fairy tales exist in a symbolic Esperanto, with familiar motifs and images and characters and plots taking on new shapes and colors and sounds. One of [...]

Fade in on the Mission Dolores, the fictional gravesite of Carlotta Valdes in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. One block away, two writers with their first jobs teaching creative writing (okay, it was us!) decide to collaborate on a book of short stories that respond to classic and cult movies. We try — and fail — to [...]

I loved books, loved stories, loved being read to at an early age and then reading for myself — that's true for most writers. But looking back, I can see a parallel interest, one I never considered related to all of that reading I did. We lived near my mother's parents, and once or twice [...]

Cosmopolitan Magazine recently released an article titled "28 Mind-Blowing Lesbian Sex Positions." Where was this vital information when I was a teenager? How much more fulfilling would my young life have been if I had known about "The Rocket," "The Kinky Jockey," or "Defying Gravity," a position in which one receives oral sex while performing [...]

Shake Puppies contains an almost unsettling amount of cuteness. There is a good chance after looking through its pages you will get puppy fever and be thrown into an unwavering quest for your next pet. Here is my sound advice if you are indeed afflicted by this condition: Rescue your next dog! Hear me say [...]

I'm always sorry to finish a book, to let go of characters I love, people I've struggled to understand for years, people who evolve before me. Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I've never had the sense I was "making up" a character. It feels more like watching people reveal themselves, ever more deeply, more intimately. [...]

The Diamond Lane, published in May 1991, was my second novel, and what is most striking about the difference between the publishing process 23 years ago and now is not that the book was written on a Kaypro, Xeroxed at Kinko's, and sent overnight in a FedEx box to G. P. Putnam's Sons, but that [...]

Brandon Bartlett, the fictional mayor of Portland in my novel Sherwood Nation, is addicted to playing video games. In a city he's all but lost control of, he relishes the little bit of control that can be got by sticking oneself behind the cockpit of a WWII airplane or facing off against a small band [...]

One day when I was 12 years old and setting off on my newspaper route after school my mom said will you stop at the doctor's and pick up something for me and I grimaced and said something almost rude but not all the way rude and off I went on my bicycle. In autumn [...]

On a hot July evening years ago, my Toyota Tercel overheated on a flat stretch of highway north of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A steam geyser shot up from beneath the hood, and the temperature gauge spiked into the red zone. I pulled onto the shoulder and shut off the engine. Except for my car's gasps [...]

My first novel, Love Me Back, was published on September 16. Writing the book took seven years, and along the way three chapters were published in different magazines and anthologies as short stories. Those three chapters are highly representative of the book — meaning there's a lot of sex, drugs, and unhappiness. Marie, the book's [...]

There's this writer, William Shakespeare. Perhaps you've heard of him. He wrote this play, Romeo and Juliet. Maybe you've heard of it as well. It's about Juliet and... her wet nurse. At least, that's what the data junkies at FiveThirtyEight.com claim. As does Jim Carter, aka Mr. Carson from Downton Abbey. What is up with [...]

My new book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, is the story of two bodies. The first body was the new kind of slavery that emerged in the young United States right after it achieved its independence from the British Empire. Although at the end of the American [...]

One guy that I dated a while back had a whole brigade of work to-do lists for various projects written in Sharpie on blank white paper. The moment I saw them all lined up on clipboards on his kitchen counter, he had my heart. Another fine fellow in my life left a to-do list out [...]

There is a passage in Jean Toomer's marvelous hybrid novel Cane that describes a woman, sitting in a theater in a northern city, whose roots, likely unbeknownst to her, sink deep through the floor and travel south. The image is fraught, of course, because the woman being described is African American and Toomer, who was [...]

Our title is, of course, a problem. "Why Literature Can Save Us." And of course the problem is one of definition: what those words mean. What is literature and what constitutes salvation? So I'll begin with a brief surface definition of the terms, since we probably all have our own and various ideas about what [...]

Saint Paul, August 2014 Dear Professor Fitger, I've been asked to say a few words about you for Powells.com. Having dreamed you up with a ball-point pen in a composition notebook (drafting on the right-hand page, and making edits and corrections on the left [see figure 1]), I should be well equipped to describe you, [...]

Today, we wonder anxiously if digital media is changing our brains. But if there's any time in history when our mental operations changed fundamentally, it was 18th century Europe, and Britain in particular. During this period, a cognitive revolution took place, powered by an extraordinary new technology: the printing press. Gutenberg's contraption was a curiosity [...]