I was finding it really hard to be grateful for just about anything. I’d been married just six months when my doctors gave me a terrifying health diagnosis. …

Like many people my age or younger, I came to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by way of the film adaptation: Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece Blade Runner. The film still stands today as my favorite movie, so much so I gave my son the middle name of Deckard (Rachel…

Although Sinclair Lewis is known to many as the author of such bestsellers as Main Street, Babbitt, and Elmer Gantry, he’s been rediscovered by a new generation for his dystopian and sobering novel It Can’t Happen Here. Written in 1935, during the middle of the Great Depression and just prior…

By Tom Blunt There’s a certain aggressive tone somebody can take that will send me reeling far back into the past, guaranteeing that a hell of a fight is about to occur — or equally likely, that I’ll become frozen in panic until the moment has passed, and then spend…

When Bram Stoker discovered Walt Whitman, he was a young man only just beginning a literary career that would eventually create one of the most enduring and lucrative characters of all time. …

Writing is, as a general rule, hard. Defining yourself as a writer can be even harder. Sure, there are other difficult practices like law and medicine out there, but a person becomes a lawyer or a doctor when he or she passes a series of exams and graduates from a…

That chill felt by writers at the sound of the words “National Novel Writing Month” is more than just a brisk fall wind. For seventeen years running, November has become a time of year associated with procrastination, scrawled notecards, and word-counts in the glorious tens of thousands — the literary…

Think about every bully you can remember, whether from fiction or real life. What do they all have in common? For the most part, they don’t read — and if they do, they probably aren’t ingesting much literary fiction. This isn’t just snobbery, it’s a case that scientists are slowly…

By Scott Porch You know the big names. George Washington, Cleopatra, etc. Important writers have written important books about them that have sold millions of copies and won major awards. In five best-selling books — Isaac’s Storm (1999), The Devil in the White City (2003), Thunderstruck (2006), In the Garden…