It would probably be funny if I hadn’t grown up in absolute terror of being Left Behind. Okay, it’s funny anyway, as long as I don’t have to be sober. My latest piece for The Awl is about the convergence of my fortieth birthday and Harold Camping’s predicted May 21 Rapture, but it’s also about a lot more, including fervent . . .
In the midst of working on something for The Awl, I returned to Twain’s brilliant riff — from Is Shakespeare Dead? — on his boyhood obsession with Satan. Here it is, for the uninitiated. When I was a Sunday-school scholar something more than sixty years ago, I became interested in Satan, and wanted to find out all I could about . . .
The first five chapters of Kate Christensen’s forthcoming — and outstanding — The Astral are online at Scribd. (You know how I adore her, and this book is her best yet.)
A heartrending autobiographical essay about the mess Sam Lipsyte made of his life before age twenty-five has echoes in his fiction, Philip Connors says.