Imagine trying to tell someone something about yourself and your desires for which there are no words. What if the mere attempt at expression was bound to misfire, to efface the truth of that ineluctable something? In "Someone", Michael Lucey conside...

How have we come to depend so greatly on the words terror and terrorism to describe broad categories of violence? David Simpson offers here a philology of terror, tracking the concept's long, complicated history across literature, philosophy, politic...

The uncontested center of the black pulp fiction universe for more than four decades was the Los Angeles publisher Holloway House. From the late 1960s until it closed in 2008, Holloway House specialized in cheap paperbacks with page-turning narrative...

In "Grammars of Approach", Cynthia Wall offers a close look at changes in perspective in spatial design, language, and narrative across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that involve, literally and psychologically, the concept of "ap...

When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing.  Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imaginat...

How, in 1930, did Alfred Wegener, the son of minister from Berlin, find himself in the most isolated spot on earth, attempting to survive an unthinkably cold winter in the middle of Greenland? In "All the Land", Jo Lendle sets out to chronicle Wegene...

The thirteen stories of Michael Kruger's "The God behind the Window" capture the poignancy and cynicism of late life through tales of misanthropic old men full of the mixture of wisdom and melancholy that so often accompanies old age. In Kruger's sto...

No human quality is more necessary for survival than love. But while love has the power to lift us up with boundless joy, it has equal strength to crush us – it is easy to lose your way within love's complex labyrinth of oppositions. "The Labyrinth...

For a fifteen-year-old, falling in love can eclipse everything else in the world, and make a few short weeks feel like a lifetime of experience. In "Love Writ Large", Navid Kermani captures those intense feelings, from the emotional explosion of a fi...

Like stars in the sky, pixels may seem like tiny, individual points. But, when viewed from a distance, they can create elaborate images. Each pixel contributes to this array, but no individual point can create the whole. The thirty stories that compr...