By: Amanda French

How to write like you have nothing left to lose.

By: Sarah Weinman

Beneath golden-age charm, a moody mastery of crime fiction.

By: Lucy Sante

You are the host of a virus; the virus is life; you are fucked.

By: Sarah Weinman

If you know CORNELL WOOLRICH’s (1903-68) oeuvre at all, it’s most likely through the films of the standout directors who’ve interpreted it: Hitchcock’s Rear Window, for example, was based on Woolrich’s story “It Had to […]

By: Tor Aarestad

Perhaps the most prolific cartoonist ever for the high-middlebrow/nobrow New Yorker, and creator of the story that inspired the quatsch film Shrek, WILLIAM STEIG (1907-2003) might not seem an obvious hero for HiLobrow.com. Ladies and […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Her Earthsea fantasy novels — most signally, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), and The Farthest Shore (1972) — concern the education of a young wizard, and are recommended for those who […]

By: Tom Nealon

It is as impossible to think of the 20th century absent Cosimo from The Baron in the Trees (1957), by ITALO CALVINO (1923-1985), as it is to think of the 19th without Raskolnikov, the 18th […]

By: Sarah Weinman

One of my favorite children’s books, the madcap Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back (1963), by SHEL SILVERSTEIN (1930-99), is about loneliness, friendship, and the perils of too much success — all of which turn […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The popularity of apocalyptic fiction in the Sixties (1964-73), it has been suggested, indicates that SF writers had become bored and suspicious of utopian idylls promising that ameliorative reforms could right modern civilization’s manifold wrongs; […]

By: Tor Aarestad

We’re riding a swell of black-humored children’s literature, these days — the Lemony Snicket books are just a whitecap. However, as dark as these contemporary tales may be, none is so misanthropic as those of […]

By: Tom Nealon

Were his novels written by half-crazed, single-minded machines?

By: Sarah Weinman

The precise definition of “New Weird” (a recent avant-garde literary movement seeking to update a moribund Fantasy/SF genre) remains elusive, but the works of British author CHINA MIÉVILLE (born 1972) simultaneously fit and subvert the […]

By: Jason Grote

In his error, performance art was born.

By: Joshua Glenn

Most of my favorite campus novels — from Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim to, say, Don DeLillo’s White Noise — were penned by a novelist who’d done short time […]

By: David Smay

He helped free science fiction from 19th-century (or any) values.