Tragedy and irony can be fickle playmates. Consider for example Philip K. Dick’s struggle to be accepted as a mainstream author, to have his work appreciated and understood outside the genre of science fiction, which was a dilemma he considered “a very long-term tragedy – of my creative life.”

Nicola Keegan’s novel about a Kansas girl who swims her way to the Seoul Olympics sounds drearily good-natured and uplifting, but if that’s what you’re after, you should paddle back to the shallow end. This isn’t like one of those sentimental biopics that give everybody a chance to go to the bathroom between the big races. Yes, the young heroine shatters records (and bones) and collects enough gold medals to fill a pirate’s treasure chest, but she also discovers that beating a husky East German with a 5 o’clock shadow is easier than competing against hopelessness and death.

New Yorkers encounter the peculiar, comic-sounding word knickerbocker all over the city: on street signs and at subway stops, in the names of condominiums, restaurants, and bars, and—shortened to the catchier Knicks—on basketball jerseys. When consummate man-about-town George Plimpton died in 2003, the New York Observer called him “the last Knickerbocker.” But what is a knickerbocker? Is being called one praise or a curse? According to historian Elizabeth L. Bradley’s new study, the term has been “used alternately with reverence or disdain” over its two-hundred-year history, quickly slipping its original meaning to become a “link between a strange, sometimes unholy

When I was a little girl, my mom—consummate feminist and literary mother par excellence—gave me Tatterhood and Other Tales, an anthology of feminist folk tales whose cover sported a soot-cheeked minx gamely beating back a gang of trolls with a wooden spoon. Published by the Feminist Press in 1978, Tatterhood was one of a slew of anthologies that emerged in the wake of the women’s rights movement to combat the patriarchal Brothers Grimm and Disney party line. But employing fairy tales for activist means was nothing new. In Weimer Germany, fairy-tale collections like the pungently titled Proletarischer Kindergarten (1921) were

Nic Brown’s Floodmarkers is set in 1989, but in its fractured portrait of small-town American life, it feels considerably older—a Winesburg, Ohio run through with Gen-X slang. Like Sherwood Anderson, Brown is essentially a still-life artist; he eschews plot for portraiture, the linear for the lateral. “His instinct was to present everything together, as in a dream,” Malcolm Cowley once wrote of Anderson. So, too, with Brown, whose first novel scatters brilliantly in a dozen directions at once, without advancing a single day.

While there’s a lot we don’t know about Bigfoot, his enthusiasts generally agree that he smells terrible, enjoys leaving footprints where people can find them, and frequents the deepest woods of northern California—a region not coincidentally inhabited by marijuana growers and tall-tale-telling lumberjacks. Primitive, hairy, big-buttocked, and benign (except when he kidnaps local women and takes them home to meet the parents), Bigfoot represents an all-natural alternative to megamalls, the Internet, and TV. Oh, and another thing—after thousands of purported sightings, there’s still not a single piece of evidence that this wise, benevolent naturist actually exists. Perhaps this is because

Revisionist history is often a bitter pill to swallow, especially when the consensus has permeated the very language of the debate. In the early 1950s, one crucial issue divided American public opinion, and continued to do so for decades. The question centred on the nature of Soviet communism, and the internal threat posed by American agents working for the KGB in the United States. Was the ‘Konspiratsia’ real, or were the accusers simply political fantasists seeking ‘Reds under the beds’? The answer lies within the pages of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr’s remarkable book.

“The essential American soul,” wrote D.H. Lawrence in a celebrated description, “is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” Of course, he was talking about Natty Bumppo and similar rough-and-tumble frontier spirits. By contrast, the amoral Tom Ripley—novelist Patricia Highsmith’s most famous character—is easygoing, devoted to his wife and friends, epicurean, and a killer only by necessity. By my count, necessity leads this polite aesthete to bludgeon or strangle eight people and watch with satisfaction while two others drown. He also sets in motion the successful suicides of three friends he actually, in his way, cares about. Yet aside from an

After the publication of his first collection of stories, Going Places, in 1969, Leonard Michaels was hailed as a brilliant new star in American letters. But for the remainder of his career he felt slighted by the sly whispers — and sometimes, the loud broadsheet cries — of East Coast literary cognoscenti, some of whom he suspected of applying personal antipathy, and many of whom marked him as a writer who had failed to rise to his potential.