Sarah Nicole Prickett

On marriage, the problems with sisterhood, and how the show Girls is an update of the classic novel by Louisa May Alcott. The fourth in a series of personal essays about reading.

Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's new film on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is getting heat for its depiction of torture and how instrumental it proved in bin Laden's eventual killing. But critics are missing the larger point—the best reason for the use of torture in Zero Dark Thirty is that it complicates our picture of the "good guys."

Michelle Houellebecq's Platform might just be the perfect Hobbesian novel—a book that plunges the reader into a moral universe where normal people feel sick, and sick people feel normal. The third in a series of essays on reading as personal experience.

American Vogue's creative director as romantic heroine, who dyes the sea blue and consults a cat psychic.

On Gothic mansions, secrets, death, and exes. The second in a series of personal essays about reading.

On insomnia, the body as murder mystery, and the surreal genre novel Bolaño wrote when only 27 and barely sleeping. The first in a series of personal essays about reading.