Nathan Ihara

I only know one veteran of the Iraq war, my friend’s younger brother. He saw heavy action in the Sunni Triangle and was the only member of his patrol to escape conflict without serious injury. I stayed up drinking with him and his sister one night, and he started telling......

“My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations,” Davis admits, “but often there is at least a little narrative in them.” This narrative element, however, seems to recede further into the background with each new collection. In Varieties of Disturbance, her most recent book of fiction since winning a......

{mosimage}“A strange phenomenon. Philip Larkin wouldn’t do public poetry readings because he said he wasn’t prepared to go about the country pretending to be himself. Well now that I’m writing under a pseudonym I have to pretend to be two people.”I’m talking to John Banville, the Irish novelist and critic,......

{mosimage} About halfway through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck’s mountebank comrade the “duke” becomes outraged when a circus audience mocks his delivery of Hamlet. “The duke said these Arkansaw lunkheads couldn’t come up to Shakespeare; what they wanted was low comedy — and maybe something ruther worse than low......

Ever since her death by guillotine in 1793, writers have been sticking their hands up inside Marie Antoinette’s bloody stump to use her pretty head as a puppet, shaping her one way or another. For a long time her depictions fell squarely in either the “devil” or “saint” camps, but......

You can’t sleep. The next night, you still can’t sleep. You don’t know it yet, but you will never sleep again. You shut your eyes, you toss and turn, you even have wisps of dreams, but you never feel rested. An EEG of your brain shows that though you occasionally......

When it comes to most art, I’m an advocate of lowering the bar. Call me conservative or simply pessimistic, but I’d much rather watch someone sail gracefully over a low ribbon than witness yet another hapless high jumper smack his poor forehead on that awful obstacle, The Next Great American......