"Are we crazy, officially? Who can tell us if we are sick or not?" The post How Chia-Lun Chang Found Power in Poetry appeared first on The Millions.

Janet Malcolm never stopped looking, and she never stopped assembling what she found. The post The Autobiographic Assemblage of ‘Still Pictures’ appeared first on The Millions.

Any given piece of writing must be categorized: the ones you keep, and the ones you share. The post To All the Novels I Never Published appeared first on The Millions.

The worldview in these stories is firmly pre-therapeutic, as pre-therapeutic as Dickens or Austen. The post The William Trevor Reader: “The Wedding in the Garden” appeared first on The Millions.

Ancient heroism was not measured in good deeds and moral excellence. The post The Casual Villainy of Greek Heroes appeared first on The Millions.

"I do tend to be drawn to characters who hold back, who may be repressed in some way." The post Elizabeth McKenzie Mines Repressed Emotions appeared first on The Millions.

On the surface, the subtitle of Sabrina Orah Mark’s new memoir-in-essays Happily—”A Personal History, With Fairy Tales”—seems contradictory. How can a narrative be simultaneously true and imaginary, historical and fantastical? The 26 essays in Happil

"I like to fantasize that I’m a comedian who answered another calling." The post Asale Angel-Ajani on What We Leave Behind appeared first on The Millions.

I’m truly undecided on whether Trevor succeeds with this story.  The post The William Trevor Reader: “On the Zattere” appeared first on The Millions.

This new-release Tuesday, check out books by Regan Penaluna, Richard Mirabella, Alexa Hagerty, and more. The post New & Notable: March 14 appeared first on The Millions.

In 'Old Babes in the Wood,' Atwood grieves the death of her partner and bygone cultural mores. The post Margaret Atwood Gets Personal appeared first on The Millions.

With the Mel Brooks Cinematic Universe (MBCU) expanding for perhaps the last time, we revisit Brooks’s memoir, 'All About Me!' The post The History of Mel Brooks: Parts I-X appeared first on The Millions.

At Sunday’s Oscars show, five scripts will be up for Best Adapted Screenplay. Two of them are derivative dogs that have no business being anywhere near the Dolby Theater—Top Gun: Maverick and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, both considered “adapte

This was the sixth phone call I’d made. My question was always the same. Have you heard of someone called R. D. Twala, who ran as a candidate in the 1963 legislative elections in Eswatini, a country in Southern Africa? Twala had lived in the small to

Johnson’s oeuvre feels like something we didn’t deserve but got anyway. The post <strong>In Denis Johnson, Darkness Met Delight</strong> appeared first on The Millions.

“The News From Ireland” is the second novella in The Collected after “Matilda’s England,” a stout 25-pager that feels to me just a bit longer than a short story. Or that is to say, it seems to do more things than a short story does or can. Not all of

Kazuo Ishiguro has had a busy few months. The acclaimed novelist has been attending film festivals and walking red carpets to promote the film Living, for which he wrote the screenplay. Living—a remake of the 1952 Japanese film Ikiru, directed by Aki

It is 1910 in Vienna and, lying prone on Sigmund Freud’s couch, Russian emigré and psychoanalytic patient Sergei Pankejeff—better known to literary posterity as, simply, “The Wolf Man”—describes a troubling nightmare. In the dream, Sergei is sleeping

This past summer, I took my son to Plimoth Plantation. That’s what it was called when I was growing up in New England in the 1980s; it’s recently been rebranded as the Plimoth Patuxet Museum. But it is neither exactly a museum nor quite so devoted to

The first time I tell Rachelle that I love her, she answers “Five reasons.” “What?” “Five reasons. Give me five reasons why.” “Five?” I say. “Five.” I look to the ceiling, mouth open, still as a corpse, and remain this way for a minute, maybe more. A

Sophia M. Stewart: The World and All That It Holds is your fourth novel and your eighth book. Does writing get easier with each publication, or is each new book a unique experience? Aleksandar Hemon: For me, writing and publishing are congruent, but

Blurb is a funny sounding word. It’s phonetically unappealing, beginning and ending with unattractive voiced bilabial stops, and its definition—an advertisement or announcement, especially a laudatory one—carries some of the same meaning as another u

"Every day I put in the jeweler's loupe, trying to make each sentence exactly right." The post Paul Harding Wants Precision appeared first on The Millions.

We wouldn’t dream of abandoning our vast biannual Most Anticipated Book Previews, but we thought a monthly reminder would be helpful (and give us a chance to note titles we missed the first time around). Here’s what we’re looking out for in March: Ma

When we meet the titular character in “Mags,” she is already dead. Which is appropriate, given the story is about a lifelong victim, Mags, and the paradoxical power that victimhood can confer. Mags is, typically enough, a lifelong spinster, whose one

1. In the late afternoon of Sunday, September 19, 1819, 23-year-old John Keats struck out for his daily walk from his lodging in Winchester, England. He’d arrived in the city a month prior, leaving behind southern England’s Isle of Wight for a change

When Russia invaded Ukraine one year ago, the region of Sumy, just northeast of Kyiv, came under intense bombardment, endangering the house where Anton Chekhov spent two halcyon summers working on his play The Wood Demon, as well as several short sto

There’s a certain kind of perfectionism that we associate with artistic genius. Consider, for example, James Joyce, the patron saint of literary obsessiveness, working for years on his last two books, revising and rewriting and rearranging even as he

The set-up for “The Paradise Lounge” is simple but effective. Beatrice and her lover have stopped for the night in the titular lounge, a shabby hotel bar in the middle of nowhere, to consummate the last night of their affair. They are observed by a r

I had the good fortune to be introduced to Jai Chakrabarti by my writer friend Amy Gottlieb, who correctly suspected that I’d love Jai’s work. His debut novel, A Play for the End of the World, got under my skin and stayed there, in the best way. His