Meredith Maran

To read Elizabeth McCracken is to understand why the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Award and other prestigious institutions have awarded her their fellowships,...

To read Elizabeth McCracken is to understand why the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Award and other prestigious institutions have awarded her their fellowships,...

In conceiving her first, impressive yet flawed novel, 30-year-old Anton DiSclafani seems to have followed the standard advice offered to newbie authors to "Write what you know." DiSclafani's protagonist, 15-year-old...

Genre fiction, the catch-all category for lowbrow literary long-forms — crime, suspense, horror, fantasy, romance, mystery and sci-fi — is the Rodney Dangerfield of literature: It can't get no respect....

The best novelists are those whose voice is unmistakable and whose hand is invisible upon the page. I'm not talking about the show-off "experimentalists" whose stylistic convolutions twist the life...