Philip Roth reviews his own biographer

"A big goal of my book is to get the average upper-middle class consumer to reckon more with what's behind the one-click," Alec MacGillis told Protocol.

Artist Heather Benjamin discusses the importance of homemade zines, why she continues to switch up her process, the complications of running your own business, and why art school wasn't useful.

Literary Lingo While serving in World War II, Joseph Heller concluded that war was a farce in which anyone crazy enough to shirk combat was considered sane enough to fight. That became the theme of…

When a book passes into the public domain, it means not only that it’s available for adapting and remixing, but for reprinting and reselling with a brand new cover. Some of these covers are .…

The activist and linguist has serious concerns about the future of American democracy, although, in his view, it “was never much to write home about.”

If the internet is “coextensive with all our mental acts,” how can it be captured in a single memoir?

The war behind a writer’s words

'If I were a participant in The Ferrante Letters, I would open with an anecdote.'

Laura June is author of Now My Heart Is Full. “Parenting wasn’t considered literary fodder for a long time. I think women in particular are raised not to complain. Which is not what I was doing. If you have to boil it down, it’s base emotion. Then you’re

Note: An audio adaptation of this essay is featured as a segment in the pilot episode of Black Mountain Radio – an artist-driven and community-focused audio project from The Believer’s home, The Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute at UNLV. In the essay, adapted for audio by producer Claire Mullen, Paoletta explores the distinct literature of what […]

‘Maybe I was born with this face the way moths are born with the ability to blend in with bark, to survive.’ A short story by Lauren Wallach.

How did the genre of self-help go from one focused on collective empowerment to one serving the class hierarchy as it stands?

The problem is I can’t make up my mind about confession.

I came to language only late and only peculiarly. I grew up in a household where the only books were the telephone book and some coloring books. Magazines, though, were called books, but only one magazine ever came into the house, a now-long-gone photographic general-interest weekly commandingly named Look. Words in this household were not […]

Why the hottest literary trend of the last decade is so blindingly white

A flimsy raft, more than 100 souls, and three teenage heroes—or are they pirates? Atavist Issue no. 95: "The Rescue," by Zach Campbell.

An interactive map of 11 years of book covers, organized by machine learning.

Harper Lee’s novel is the closest thing America’s had to required reading. But the book’s failings in confronting racism are more apparent than ever to White educators—and Black ones wonder what took so long.

My problems were never ones of scarcity. I suffered from abundance.