#CraftAndCriticism

With the Royal Navy ruling the waves, Queen Victoria safely on her throne, science explaining a confusing world, and British missionaries, explorers, and armies turning the map pink you’d think that the mid-19th-century English (or at le...

In late 1934, Langston Hughes, already established as a leading voice of literary Black America, traveled to Mexico City, where he stayed for more than five months and began translating short fiction by prominent Mexican and Cuban writer...

*Memoir Nation: Weekly Inspiration for Writers* is an extension of the Memoir Nation community hosted by Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner, two friends and colleagues who bring a community-minded sensibility to the writing journey.

The world was not necessarily a small place for me as a child, but it was consistent.

In 1985, when a relatively young party functionary Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union, a new era began.

The first time I visited Green River Cemetery in East Hampton, New York, I had already read Ann Rower’s wonderful book *Lee and Elaine*.

Wayne Koestenbaum’s new novel, *My Lover, the Rabbi,* is out now from FSG, so we asked him a few questions about writing, reading, and whatever else was on his mind.

When my mother died of cancer in 2023, the grief turned my mind into a speculative machine.

The best way I can describe Meredith Gran’s recently released video game *Perfect Tides: Station to Station*—or at least the best way I can describe it to people who read contemporary literature—is that it feels like a version Elif Batum...

Lio Min’s 2022 novel,* Beating Heart Baby, *begins with a charming queer Filipino high school senior trumpet player named Santi being driven to his new high school by his beloved guardian, Aya, taking in the sight of “the city of a thous...

“After an exhaustion of New Narrative trickling up to mass market autofiction, literary authors are experimenting with genres like crime, thriller, horror,” observed Whitney Mallett, the critic and titular Whitney behind *The* *Whitney R...

“Goodbye, Pamela Paul,” was the headline of Andrea Long Chu’s now-iconic, recently ASME-nominated *New York Magazine* farewell to the former *NY Times Book Review* editor, when Paul left the paper two years ago.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing that the long, rich history of women playing American tackle football extends all the way back to 1896—a five-on-five scrimmage in New York City that was cut short by police, ostensibly for the players’...

“I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me fear,” Vivek Shraya writes as the opening line of her memoir, *I’m Afraid of Men *(2018/Penguin Canada).

I was just beginning to think of myself as a writer when I encountered Toni Morrison’s conversation with Charlie Rose, in which she spoke about the importance of African literature in the early development of her own writing career.