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A Zombie Novel Without Zombies: An Interview with Bennett Sims

I wanted my characters to be able to argue about undeath without ever having to actually run from or fend off the undead… Since the characters don’t feel threatened by the undead, their conversations are free to shift away from the apocalyptic logistics of most zombie fiction (‘How do we survive?’ ‘How do we kill them?’ ‘How do we know who’s been bitten?’) to a more passive fascination with zombies’ creatureliness (‘What do they remember?’ ‘Are they conscious?’ ‘What is it like to be them?’).

6 February (1865): Stéphen Mallarmé to Henri Cazalis

By Staff × This Day in "Lettres"

That distress you feel at the hour when dreams and the pillow must be left and you must enter the cold day which holds no secret and whose monotonous emptiness you know in advance!

"Invocation"From the Print

By Ann Lauterbach × Fiction & Poetry

Bring the huge vernacular. / Bring trysts of jealous / gods and a girl changed into a tree / and the tree, bring it / back or forward into / the foreseeable quantum dawn / shielding opalescent fog…

5 February (1951): Raymond Chandler to Edgar Carter

By Staff × This Day in "Lettres"

My filing case opens out into a very convenient portable bar, and the bartender, who lives in the bottom drawer, is a midget named Harry Cohn.

On Thermonuclear Monarchy: An Interview with Elaine Scarry

By Sarah Gerard × In Conversation

In the nuclear age, Constitutions have been belittled and deformed by having their war provisions ignored. So, too, social contract theory has been set aside in the nuclear age. One of the leading theorists of peace, Thomas Hobbes has been turned upside down into an apologist for executive war making…

4 February (1918): H. L. Mencken to Philip Goodman

By Staff × This Day in "Lettres"

H. L. Mencken and Philip Goodman became close friends while growing up in the German-American neighborhood of West Baltimore. In 1918, Goodman (now a New York bon vivant loosely associated with the publishing industry) sent Mencken a letter paying tribute … Continued

3 February (1850): Emily Dickinson to George H. Gould

By Staff × This Day in "Lettres"

Sir, I desire an interview; meet me at sunrise, or sunset, or the new moon—the place is immaterial. In gold, or in purple, or sackcloth—I look not up on the raiment.

Shots in the Dark: Interrogating Gun Violence in Fiction

By Adrian Van Young × Criticism

It’s as though Proulx and Finn mean to demonstrate to us in showing the violence as they do that the passion vindicated in a murder with a gun will never outlive the hot moment it lurks in. Both deaths are murder-suicides where neither the victim nor shooter survives; they’re double-barreled sound and fury, absorbing themselves like an unhealthy star…

31 January (1976): Vladimir Nabokov to Samuel Rosoff

By Staff × This Day in "Lettres"

I am still at war with Field, who turned out to be a rat, and am forcing him to delete or alter all sorts of tripe in his book about me.

30 January (1870): Walt Whitman to William Rosetti

By Staff × This Day in "Lettres"

My dismissal from moderate employment in 1865 by the Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Harlan, avowedly for the sole reason of my being the author of “Leaves of Grass,” still affords an indication of the high conventional feeling.