Essay

Sartre and the Boyfriend Philosophers

On NYRB’s new Jean-Paul Sartre collection, and those who act as if they always have something else to teach us.

Marie Calloway, Degrading Sex, and Books About It

Marie Calloway doesn't just write about sex, she writes about brutal, porn-inspired sex that's both exciting and troubling. As a young, attractive woman who writes so freely about it, it's no wonder she's a target for fierce criticism.

Resurrecting the Dead, or, Writing about Family

Wayne Grady grapples with the sometimes outlandish demands of his dead relatives, who metamorphose from real people into fictional characters once he begins to write their story.

I Love a Man in Uniform: The Rise of Military Industrial Complex Chic

Bomber jackets, Ray-Bans, Dr. Martens and plain white tees—how the world’s armed forces influence the fashion of rebellion.

In Defence of a Liberal Arts Degree

I do not have a job or any sense of where my career is headed. I have done unpaid internship after unpaid internship. And yet I wouldn't trade my overpriced undergraduate experience for anything.

Last Words, Famous and Otherwise

Melville House’s Last Interview series—featuring final interviews with Jacques Derrida, David Foster Wallace, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, and Roberto Bolaño—raises a question: do we want the snappy epithet, or the drooling, struggling goodbye?

Just Eat It: How Food is Slicing Vancouver in Two

Vancouver’s impoverished Downtown Eastside is cannibalizing itself over a vicious argument between fine diners and the area’s desperate need for more social housing.

My Mother, My Rival: The Revolutionary Honesty of Resenting Your Kids

Linda Grace Hoyer had little luck as a writer, so she encouraged her son, John Updike, to follow the path. His success might have sparked a grudge in her, but let’s not pretend that means she wasn’t a good mother.

||Photo by Gail Mooney
I Believe In Astrology

Maybe it's hokum, but horoscopes—and tarot readings, too—satisfy a deep need within us for someone who knows the answers.

| Underground work, Bonanza Creek | From the Klondyke Souvenir published by H.J. Goetzman in 1901, via BC Bibliography Collection , |Michael K. Williams as Omar Little in The Wire , || From the Klondyke Souvenir published by H.J. Goetzman in 1901, via BC Bibliography Collection , | Ascending Chilkoot Pass, 1989 | From the Klondyke Souvenir published by H.J. Goetzman in 1901, via BC Bibliography Collection
Reimagining Canadian Culture: Pierre Berton meets The Wire

Canadian literature and its capacity for myth-making has rarely proved much of a match for the violent, frontier stories of American culture—whether contemporary (The Wire) or historical (Deadwood). A winter's stay in the Yukon, however, gives the author pause to wonder whether this needs to be so, and proposes a (bloody) dramatic series or two of our own.