Okay, yes: Hugh Hefner, who died on Wednesday, was not a good guy. But whether because of or in spite of its founder’s influence, Playboy has long been an undeniable platform for writers and their ...

2025 has been a year of contradictions: hyperconnectivity and loneliness, political theater and private reckoning, a collective desire to scream without forgetting how to whisper. Each collection on ...

Growing up, book banning and burning held a strange place in my consciousness. They were part of a distant reality: a relic of the past to learn about in textbooks and a horror of alternate realities ...

I might argue that the sea is literature’s greatest character, living as she does among the best mysteries ever written. And yet she is modest. She rarely takes center stage. Instead, she washes ...

For avid readers, literary adaptations can be a source of both excitement and contention. Will the visual language of the film match the landscape in your head? Can the director capture that elusive ...

Set in a near-future version of the American Midwest, Michael Credico’s novella, Technicolor Horses, explores the disaster of an Ohio community caught in chaos and how trust erodes alongside their ...

One recent evening, I brought to a simmer a pint of dry, hazy cider, then draped into the pan a whole glistening trout. I diced an onion, having torn off the papery outer layers; having peeled back ...

National Book Award winner Yōko Tawada blends fiction and reality to create a fragmented sensation when moving between physical spaces like Japan, Russia, Siberia, and Germany. The reader becomes a ...

As a child in Brooklyn, my spirits rose and fell on the tides of a girl named Susan’s moods and disposition. We met in 1958, when both of us were three, our mothers both pregnant with unwanted (by us) ...

What is a family? As a child, answering that question felt like the easiest thing in the world. I was still blissfully oblivious, then, to the complexities of family life. The varying configurations, ...

In the final weeks of the year, there’s no better feeling than getting cozy and delving into your winter reading. It’s the perfect time to revisit old favorites and discover new ones along the way!

Email, we can probably all agree, is generally a bummer. At the moment, my inbox is a jumble of stressful news stories and tasks I’m behind on jammed alongside emails from friends I really do want to ...