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Amy Sedaris has a number of guises, many of which are familiar through the stories her brother, David, tells on NPR’s This American Life and in his books. Together, the siblings have written and performed plays as The Talent Family. Then there’s her notorious Jerri Blank character, the crack-whore-turned-high-school student in the Comedy Central series … Read more

“Success breeds interest,” says Special Agent Robert Wittman of the FBI’s Art Crime Team by way of pointing out that that since 2004, the agency has recovered some 750 artworks worth more than $60 million. That means, of course, that art thieves are flourishing as well. And while their line of work might seem glamorously … Read more

Famously reclusive, elusive, and allusive, Thomas Pynchon is the closest thing the American literary scene has to a mythical being (not counting such literally mythical characters as JT LeRoy and maybe Danielle Steel). It remains a marvel that in the age of the Smoking Gun, the guy has so successfully guarded his privacy, but it’s … Read more

There’s never been anything flashy about Alice Munro’s fiction, but she is unrivaled when it comes to sifting through seemingly quiet, parochial lives and uncovering, through small, precise details and close character study, the universal undertow.ne standing the title of greatest living short-story w In fact, her greatness has been proclaimed so often that saying … Read more

The Cities have plenty of venues for teaching writing or hosting visiting authors, but the Minnesota Center for Book Arts is unique in that it treats the book as an artistic expression in and of itself. Book art is an inclusive term, covering everything from decorative spine-stitching to historical printing techniques to a limited-edition, calfskin-bound … Read more

Meissner’s literary debut, in 1994, was Hitting into the Wind, an acclaimed collection of thirty baseball stories. He’s since gone on to write poetry (American Compass was published in 2004) and now another story collection, The Road to Cosmos. These portraits of “regular” individuals include, as a recurring figure, a man named Skip, who is … Read more

William Gay’s strain of Southern fiction is a nearly perfect blend of the dark and the comic. A ferocious stylist with a flair for the sinister and the forsaken, he deserves both a cult and a wider audience. While it isn’t hard to pin down his influences, Gay is less baroque than Faulkner, looser than … Read more

What happens when one really smart, hip young writer marries another really smart, hip young writer? In the case of Ben Marcus, who heads up the MFA program in creative writing at Columbia University, and Heidi Julavits, founding editor of the Believer, the ultracool, ultrasincere arts and culture review, they do a tour together. Both … Read more

Unlike the writer with whom she shares a surname, Eva Hesse is one of those artists who really never goes out of favor. Sure, there’s nothing like a tragic, early death to provoke and sustain interest (she succumbed to a brain tumor in 1970, at the age of thirty-four), but the fact remains that work … Read more