By: Matthew Battles

JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899–1986). The gaucho stood over the dead man, smeared the blade of his facón across his poncho, and slid it away somewhere within the folds of cloth. The smell of blood already […]

By: Ingrid Schorr

Despite her reputation as the witty gal of the Algonquin Round Table, DOROTHY PARKER (1893-1967) dismissed the clique as “just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were.” They […]

By: Erik Davis

He introduced “outsideness” — cosmic dread — to science fiction.

By: Patrick Cates

Until he was nearly 50, CHARLES BUKOWSKI (1920-94), drinker, womanizer, brawler and writer, cranked out short stories and poetry only in his spare time. These garnered him a reputation for miniatures that accurately and painfully […]

By: Tor Aarestad

In all of her writing and art TOVE JANSSON (1914-2001) paid keen attention to the beauty and detail in the natural world. But the descriptions and illustrations of people (or their fantastical stand-ins: hemulens, fillyjonks, […]

By: Mimi Lipson

Novelist, poet, and newspaper man DON MARQUIS (1878-1937) was once a household name. Now he is mostly remembered for his Archy and Mehitabel story-poems. Because they are about creatures (a cockroach and an alley cat, […]

By: Tor Aarestad

In 1927, ELIAS CANETTI (1905-94) threw himself into a Viennese crowd protesting an acquittal in a murder trial. The crowd went on to burn down the Palace of Justice, and Canetti’s feeling of selflessness and […]

By: Erik Davis

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the 18th lord of the Irish barony of Dunsany, hunted big game in Africa and played champion chess. As LORD DUNSANY (1878-1957), he also wrote, without revising, a prodigious number […]

By: James Parker

John Mortimer, the barrister who successfully defended Last Exit To Brooklyn, a novel by HUBERT SELBY JR. (1928-2004), against an obscenity charge in a ’60s British courtroom, would do the same ten years later for […]

By: Lucy Sante

If CHESTER HIMES (1909-84) hadn’t found himself broke in France in the mid-1950s he might today be remembered only as the author of some acute, painful treatments of racism and prison life — the kind […]

By: Erik Davis

Smith explored the inner landscapes opened up by postwar mind science.

By: James Parker

The castle of consciousness, turret and coign, too huge for the human head, where stalk the battlements, robed and forbidding, the super-intelligent dead, has terrible deeps and horrible heights, and walls that are wondrous thick, […]

By: Jason Grote

The biography of ROBERT A. HEINLEIN (1907-88) firmly places Golden-Age SF on the grand continuum of Americana: the no-nonsense engineer’s mentality of his Kansas City upbringing, his longing for military service (he graduated from the […]

By: Patrick Cates

Patrick C. stared in silent disbelief at the bureaucrat who sat on the other side of the desk. Eventually he gathered himself and spoke in an exasperated plea: “You want me to write 150 words […]

By: Lucy Sante

“They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” The celebrated first line of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) by JAMES M. CAIN (1892-1977) tersely illustrates his verbal and narrative economy as well as […]