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.
“I chose a very short text because I knew that I would read without stopping to breathe, thus very badly.” Amelié Nothomb keeps a culture diary, converses at PEN with Buket Uzuner.
At The Awl today I profile Emma Forrest, author of Your Voice in My Head, a memoir that left me raw, shaken, and hopeful all at once. An excerpt: If you’ve ever been in therapy and liked, trusted and worried about losing your shrink, Emma Forrest has lived your nightmare. Three years ago, her psychiatrist died of lung cancer she . . .