You’re about to tell us all about Lydia Millet. Why should we want to know about her? What you’re asking for here is what’s known as “the hook.” The hook is the part of the essay where I try to …

This symposium opens with a provocation: What are animals for? The question almost solicits its own rejection, invoking as it does one of the central tenets of much animal advocacy: animals are not for anything, and they ought to be …

Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, the two most important American writers of their era, both grew up in the Midwest. Franzen describes his childhood in Webster Groves, Missouri as having unfolded “in the middle of the middle [where] there …

In Issue 9 of N+1, the critic (and UCLA English professor) Mark McGurl describes the problem facing the contemporary novel this way: What should the novel do once consciousness has been physically “explained”? What happens to the tradition of novelistic …

In his essay, “What is a Classic?” T.S. Eliot answers his own question. A classic, he says, is an ideal literary work, mature in literary terms and produced in a “mature society.” A good reader should be able to place …

It is a beautiful Sunday evening in May—clear, still, warm—and I am throwing up my own shit. That this is biologically possible, let alone how it feels and how the nurses will respond to it (a faintly perceptible ripple of …

Chris Ware makes comics. He’s been doing this since he was an undergrad at the University of Texas in the late Eighties and then a discontented grad student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early Nineties. He self-published …

Underworld was DeLillo’s last important novel, exposing the limitations of his art while crystallizing its lasting achievements.

The reflections I share in this space may appear, at moments, to indulge in the barbed and the bitter, and the reader unfamiliar with my subject and with my own work, and otherwise disinclined to assertive denunciation, may be tempted …

The London-based Granta “magazine of new writing” has devoted its 108th issue to the city of Chicago. The special issue, whose release was celebrated with a week of local events in September, promises a tour of Chicago during its “cultural moment,” in …