Literature Archives

Literature

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

by Lauren Elkin,

From Scaffolding, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. One day, with nothing else to do, I go back to my old journals, rows and rows…

A Posthumous Shock

by Will Self,

How everything became trauma

Counter Culture

by Caleb Crain,

Fighting for literature in an age of algorithms

Ways of Being Silent

by Tillie Olsen,

from the archive 50 years ago in Harper’s Magazine Literary history and the present are dark with silences: the years-long silences of acknowledged greats; the ceasing to publish after one…

The Sharp Edge of Life

by Saul Bellow,

By Saul Bellow, from a previously unpublished essay written in 1951 and included in There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, edited by Benjamin Taylor and out…

On Joyce and Syphilis

by Kevin Birmingham,

New evidence of the author’s suffering, and reflections on the scholarly debate

What Is Literature?

by Arthur Krystal,

In defense of the canon

In the Margins of Twelve Years a Slave

by Mary Niall Mitchell,

Tracing an original edition of Solomon Northup’s narrative to a slaveholder

The Burnt, the Abandoned, and the Died-on

by Joshua Cohen,

Bernard Malamud’s three unfinished novels

NYC vs. HEA

by Jesse Barron,

Romance writers, Jennifer Weiner, and the future of publishing

Future as Parable

by John Crowley,

By John Crowley, from a lecture delivered in June at MoMA PS1 as part of Triple Canopy’s Speculations (“The future is ”) series. Crowley’s article “Madame and the Masters” appeared…