Millennials in Beattieland

No word haunts discussions of Ann Beattie like the word generation. Once upon a time, back when novelists still had the luxury of holding their publicity at a ...

The Email Master

By all accounts, Nell Zink writes fantastic emails. The story of how she brazenly initiated a correspondence with Jonathan Franzen, convincing him over time to act as her agent and promoter, is now a ...

Franzen Makes Nice

Reading Jonathan Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, in a state at once sympathetic and skeptical, I kept thinking of George Kaplan. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest, a ring of foreign ...

Story Time

For a few weeks at the start of 2013, George Saunders was the gently puzzled face of American letters. You could see him being interviewed by Stephen Colbert, Charlie Rose, or George Stephanopoulos ...