Writers and most other people without real jobs spend most of their work time not actually creating things but either “making bad work for hire” or “burning with envy.” Our tabloid culture encourages this. Lena Dunham and Tina Fey and Hoda Kotb and whichever German teen or war-on-terror combatant was most recently held captive in a basement have all received bazillion-dollar book advances, and that is so unfair! How could capitalism work that way, that some product that is worth a lot of money would then be purchased for a lot of money to make a corporation a lot more money?

Something writers

Care to guess the name of “the most dangerous book that never existed”? It’s neither the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred nor The King in Yellow—see the works of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers for the eldritch details about these accursed volumes. How about the 1917 edition of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, the unsettling, otherworldly reference book of Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”? Nope.

All these are certainly dangerous books—within the fictional frameworks in which they appear. But De tribus impostoribus (On the Three Impostors) made its impact in the real world

Seven years ago, I began research on a play about Edward Kelley, one of the most notorious alchemists of Renaissance Europe. Lurid legends abound about his career and pursuit of the philosopher’s stone (angelic conversations, sexual sharing, mysterious red powders found in tombs), and I quickly discovered that the primary literature on Kelley and Renaissance alchemy was a muddle of confusion and outright contradiction. Much of it had been translated from the Latin and published by spiritualists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the tracts were encoded in a seeming welter of startling

Let’s reject the knee-jerk assumption: Paperwork is not dull. Time consuming, vexing, and prone to error, yes; but, as chronicled by Ben Kafka, never dull. Paperwork deserves our derision, but, Kafka argues, it also warrants our consideration, since it holds inordinate sway over our politics and psyches. As proof, Kafka sets his study of paperwork’s powers and failures around the French Revolution, when the application of Enlightenment principle became inseparable from the implementation of clerical protocol. Circa 1789, paperwork—which Kafka defines as documents produced by demand of the

Whenever I take a bath, I am faced with a question: To read or not to read? Of course, bringing printed matter near water is always a risk. But the reward—a transcendent moment of absorption in both liquid and text—is usually too large to forgo. And so, I have ruined numerous books and magazines, from issue after issue of the Economist to my grandfather’s first edition of Architecture without Architects.

In a way, Leonard Koren’s WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing was the sort of publication that refused to be contemplated in situ. It bounced, ecstatically, from essays titled “Concerning

At the end of an interview with Jonathan Rosen conducted in 1994, V.S. Naipual says, "Do you think I've wasted a bit of myself talking to you?" Rosen hedges, saying that’s not how he’d put it. Naipaul says, “You’ll cherish it?” It is nasty and ungracious. It is also true. And this—the willingness to say something awful and true—is the reason why I want to hear Naipaul describe the world. He is more honest than most of us dare to be.

In Benjamin Anastas’s Too Good to Be True—a memoir that should be required reading for all creative writing MFA candidates and, come to think of it, anybody who