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Like everything else I write, this piece started out as a one-page fragment consigned for several years to the drawer of Shame and Self-Loathing. When I was living in San Diego a couple of years ago, teaching and learning to surf, I pulled it out and...

Marshall:Earl here. Got your letter of rejection, no hard feelings, friend. Thanks to your speedy response and uncommon alacrity, my idea is now free to be pitched to other

Before the low-cost German supermarkets Aldi and Lidl came over in the late 1990s, the UK had its own homegrown "subprime" supermarket chain, Kwik Save. It grew up in North Wales near where I grew up and it pioneered the margin-boosting tactics of...

This is a story that started off as a confessional letter. I lived in China during my early 20s and until now haven't wanted to write anything about it. "Medicine" appears here as an excerpt from a novel-in-progress about those years

This story is based on several drinking sessions that I had the joyous privilege of experiencing in Petersburg a couple of years ago as a guest of a writers' workshop. I will never forget the effects of absinthe and hope that I have a chance to sample...

If you rated magazines on a scale of 100 for megasellers to 0 for practically shunned, poetry journals would barely register in the high minuses. Who exactly is the itsy

Whether as a function of human nature or a product of being raised in a capitalist society, people like to own the newest, biggest, shiniest things.

A young man named Oleg was left an orphan when his mother died. All he had left was his older sister, for though his father was still alive, he turned out not to be Oleg's real father. Oleg's real father, as he learned when he started going through his...

OH BOY ANOTHER LIL CINDY ADVENTURE

HONORÉ DE BALZAC (1799-1850)Balzac, one of the supreme writers of realistic fiction, was, in his own life, a man of gross appetites and pretensions as well as of gargantuan genius and accomplishment

Gary Fisketjon is an editor at large and vice president of Knopf. Among the writers he has edited are Raymond Carver, Bret Easton Ellis, Patricia Highsmith, Cormac McCarthy, Jay McInerney, and Tobias Wolff.

Noir is a short novel starring you as Philip M. Noir, Private Investigator. It began as a story about a dockside detective in pursuit of something-like truth or beauty, the ineffable-and became over the course of its writing a kind of...