Onto Sperm Racing’s elegantly vulgar premise, the company has grafted a lame higher purpose intended to justify and temper ...

A version of that story appears in Seven: or, How to Play a Game Without Rules (Faber & Faber), Kavenna’s sly and dextrous new novel about the same student and the same professor, who specializes in ...

Flannery O’Connor’s favorite meal at the Sanford House restaurant in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lunched regularly with her mother, was fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie. O ’ Connor, after ...

Good afternoon, John in Paris. Can you hearyour city station by transatlantic phone?“This one or that.” Of course I don’t know who the tenor is.Since I forgot your birthdaythis July this seemed an ...

A dune begins with an obstacle—a stone, a shrub, a log,anything heavy enough to resist being moved by wind. This obstacle forms a wind shadow on its leeward side,making eddies in the currents, now ...

Nearly everyone who came of age in the nineties remembers hidden tracks, those Easter eggs of the CD era. Artists embedded secret songs or demos after a disc’s final track; listeners combed through ...

Mary Stuart was six days old when she became the Queen of Scotland. Her precious body was guarded from that moment onward, moved like a pawn on a chessboard from one castle to another. Maybe the ...

This morning, before breakfast, I played nineteen games of Scrabble on my phone. I won thirteen. It took less than an hour. Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve played Scrabble every day, ...

An encounter with Emerson’s essays. This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as ...

Last spring, a friend of a friend visited my office and invited me to Langley to speak to Invisible Ink, the CIA’s creative writing group. I asked Vivian (not her real name) what she wanted me to talk ...

When I began to research the history of crosswords for my recent book on the subject, I was sort of shocked to discover that they weren’t invented until 1913. The puzzle seemed so deeply ingrained in ...

When I was eleven, we lived in an English Tudor on Bluff Road in Glencoe, Illinois. One day, three strange men (two young, one old) knocked on the door. Their last name was Frank. They said they’d ...