From Swedish Book Review, a special issue on crime fiction. America's Rebel Artist: Was Jack Kerouac a keeper of visions or a self-destructive individualist? Why We Love Fiction: Stories play a large part in our lives, not only as a pastime; more important is that fiction has helped humanity survive — even though science can explain the need of fiction, it cannot replace it. An excerpt from Bring on the Books for Everyone: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture by Jim Collins. Alberto Manguel reviews The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600 by Steven Moore (and more). Tom Wolfe and other writers used to tell us about the state of America, but now if you’re looking for great social novels you’d better turn to crime writers like Richard Price and Dennis Lehane. Get a real degree: Elif Batuman reviews The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl. The first chapter from Playing Gods: Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction by Andrew Feldherr. Fred Kaplano on how Howl changed the world (and more). Can fiction be trusted to tell the truth? Jose Rodrigues dos Santos discusses the complicated relationship between truth and fiction, in both journalism and novels. From The Paris Review, an interview with Michel Houellebecq. Modernism still matters: Writers such as T S Eliot and Samuel Beckett worked in synchrony with continental Europeans such as Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka, pushing against the limitations of art — why have English-language writers turned away from this challenge? A review of What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici (and more and more and more). Walter Russell Mead on how science fiction is a genre that everyone should read. 666 is a tale of the Tribulation so bad, it's good: Eschatology is maybe the worst literary genre of all time, but it's still a guilty pleasure.
