On a brief visit to Jerusalem I walked the streets of Mea Shearim, one of the city’s more colorful neighborhoods, and home to Haredi Jews. The ingenuous tourist could be forgiven for thinking that he or she has strayed onto a film set depicting the life of a nineteenth-century Jewish shtetl. But life in Mea Shearim is for real, preserved the way it was a hundred years ago. My eye caught a trio of skinny, pallid-looking men in tall black hats and draped in black frock coats. They stood there in a circle as if mumbling the words of a

Charles Homar, the hero of William Giraldi’s novel, is a middling memoirist of minor acclaim and a columnist for a popular glossy magazine called New Nation Weekly. Four times a month, this esteemed periodical pays Homar to recount, in majestically baroque language, the various travails that God hath inflicted upon Charles Homar, which include a perpetually dyspeptic father and a stubborn squirrel infestation in his suburban New England home. New Nation Weekly, of course, is a fiction, as is the conceit that any publication would employ Homar to fill its pages. He’s a dolt, this guy, self-centered and unflaggingly loquacious,

According to Kinsley’s Law, first promulgated by New Republic editor and columnist Michael Kinsley: “The real scandal is what’s legal.” The Watergate scandal – a bungled espionage attempt against the Democratic Party – unseated an otherwise popular President whose bombing of Indochinese civilians was one of the 20th century’s great barbarities. The Iran-Contra scandal, in which a not-yet-impotent Congress’s prerogatives were flouted, embarrassed an even more popular President whose foreign policy had turned Central America into a graveyard. Occasional vote-buying or procurement scandals pale in comparison with the everyday inequities of campaign finance and the revolving door from Congress, the

How do you write a biography of David Bowie? How do you pin down a grasshopper aesthete whose core belief is that the only thing worse than looking the same twice is sounding the same twice?

Five years ago, when Twitter was just another start-up and the iPad was a gleam in Steve Jobs’s eye, the state of print book reviews in this country was undergoing a spectacular and noisy collapse. Newspapers that were failing financially killed off their stand-alone print book sections, or folded them into the entertainment, ideas, or culture sections. They fired staff book editors and critics and cut freelance budgets. Hundreds of newspapers shut down altogether. Many magazines stopped covering books, and the literary quarterlies, for decades the champions of poetry and literary fiction published by independent presses, faced funding challenges as

In May, after my novel manuscript had been read and rejected by a healthy number of editors, my husband rewrote my author bio. It read as follows: Edan Lepucki was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1981. He currently lives in East Bushwick. As an American woman living in an uncool neighborhood in Los Angeles, I thought this hilarious. I also wondered — not entirely seriously, and not entirely in jest — if the revision might help my situation. My situation being that my agent had begun submitting my book nine months prior (not that I was keeping track), and it

March over to Europe to gawk at its churches and what are you told? The tour guides, the tour-guiding priests—they tell you that the greatest cathedrals are left ­unfinished, and do you know why? Don’t be afraid to raise a hand. The answer is ­because God’s work is unfinished—­because we are unfinished.

Since literary publications so often struggle with gender disparity, in their contributor lists and mastheads, in the books they review and the viewpoints they include, why don’t men who consider themselves allies to equality simply refuse publication? Why doesn’t the “How do we fix this?” question include the responsibility of male writers, not just male editors, in its solution? Why shouldn’t writers cultivate a list of publications they will and won’t submit or pitch to on the basis of equity?