Essay

There are books for kids simply about trucks being trucks. Then there are cautionary tales like the one in which a boy gets his fingers cut off for being a picky eater—stories about cause and effect, separation from loved ones, stealing, and death. But what’s better than books to ruin a child’s innocence?

Literary writing about sex is rare and usually fails to do justice to the act itself. Is honest writing about sex impossible? Or do authors simply need to do a little more sinning?

There are greater singers than Leonard Cohen, and as a new biography by Sylvie Simmons details, few cultural icons who can rival him for caddish behaviour. Still, after a career spanning fifty years, the appeal of both his art and persona endures. How does Cohen get away with it?

Children's literature, from Aesop to the Brothers Grimm and more recently Roald Dahl, has always operated in the realm of the grotesque. Re-watching the film Gremlins almost three decades later—its script very loosely descended from Dahl's first published story, and at the time of its release derided by critics for being excessively gross—is a reminder that what many kids will always love is simply good old fashioned mayhem.

Few works of literature have idealized childhood so profoundly as Peter Pan. But the Llewelyn Davies brothers who inspired J.M. Barrie to create the world of Neverland would grow up to become “Lost Boys” of a more tragic sort, beset by misfortune and unhappiness.

With Winter Journal, a book that looks back at his sixty-four years and manages to be at once fragmentary and precise, Paul Auster has proven himself a master of the uncommon memoir.

When J.T. LeRoy—supposedly a young, damaged, former street hustler cum literary prodigy—was unveiled as thirty-nine-year-old Laura Albert, what was quickly forgotten amidst the scandal was how powerful the books produced under his name actually were.

Because sometimes a writer needs to spend years living with a loathsome character.

The author of The Ice Passage explains why there's more than history at stake in the latest search for the Franklin ships.