Imagine if the most cunning and cosmopolitan poet of our era—John Ashbery, say—were a progressive US senator from a small state far from Los Angeles, New York, or Washington, along the lines of Bernie Sanders. Envision, too, that this poet/politician hides out in the margins of his poems, such that his angle on any subject, philosophical, religious, or political, atomizes into irreconcilable fragments—except that he also writes fierce, polemical pamphlets, though often without signing his name to them, and maneuvers under threat of exposure and censure. Consider that he has no fixed abode;

A few years ago I received a letter from Barry Hannah, written in a shaky hand, on University of Mississippi stationery. I was working at the Paris Review, and he was writing to submit a short story by one of his students. It was a generous gesture, and a rare one, too—you’d be surprised how infrequently authors submit their favorite students’ work. (The students might be even more surprised.) But the most striking thing about the letter was the way Hannah introduced himself. “I’m not accustomed to this kind of thing, but I’m the author of Geronimo Rex, Airships, Ray, High Lonesome . . . ” An

"It was by taking novels seriously in my youth that I learned to take life seriously,” writes Orhan Pamuk in The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, a book based on the Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 2009. Fewer and fewer readers still seem to approach fiction in this spirit, not just as an entertainment but as a vale of soul-making, and the power of Pamuk’s short book lies less in his theorizing about the novel than in his professions of faith in it. That faith is all the stronger, perhaps, because Pamuk—who won the Nobel Prize in 2006—did not discover his calling as a writer until

“I left Claude, the French rat.”

This opening salvo in the verbal barrage that is Iris Owens’s sublime 1973 snarkfest After Claude is as good a first sentence as American fiction of the ’70s offers, right up there with “Fame requires every excess” (Great Jones Street) and “Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic” (Ninety-two in the Shade). Mincing no words, Harriet, the laceratingly funny and thoroughly deluded antiheroine, launches her daisy-cutter diatribe with perfect economy. And, as she does throughout the book, she gets things exactly

Early in A Voice from Old New York, a posthumous memoir by Louis Auchincloss, who died last January, the author relates, in typically breezy manner, an anecdote about “my richest friend and contemporary, Marshall Field IV.” The Chicago newspaperman’s death in 1965, from a drug overdose, was the result of Field’s “tragic inheritance,” writes Auchincloss. He’s not referring to the hand-me-down wealth and privilege that so often hollow out great families, but to the “nervous troubles” that plagued Field’s father and presumably led his grandfather to suicide. “The story of the Fields is like that

In his memoir A Mile Down (2005), David Vann revisits the horrors of a sea voyage—a journey from which he nearly didn’t return—while reflecting on the suicide of his father. Legend of a Suicide (2008), a suite of linked stories about a man and his son living in various uncivilized parts of Alaska, stops on Sukkwan, an isolated island that’s home to a slaughterhouse of a cabin and little else. Caribou Island, Vann’s third book and first novel, revisits the same dark territory, physical and otherwise, depicting a family haunted by the specter of self-annihilation and the siren call of the Alaskan

Though it was the Paris Review that published Stephen Dixon’s first short story, “The Chess House,” all the way back in 1963, the relationship between the author and the Review’s editor, George Plimpton, was always fraught. By then, Dixon, born in 1936, had already been a news reporter (he was the first to interview Khrushchev on American soil), an art school model, a bus driver, a bartender, and a schoolteacher. Mostly what he was was poor. Sometime after “The Chess House,” Plimpton stopped returning his messages. So Dixon got desperate and pretended to be the actor Howard Duff—a man famous