Absent Things As If They Are Present
by Jeannie Vanasco
Erasure literature—from the Jefferson Bible to Jonathan Safran Foer—challenges the ideas of authorship, originality, and influence.

Language Murder
by Michael Schulman
Postwar Britain’s gay argot, Polari, created a necessary verbal safe space (and a lot of ways to talk about penis size).

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Haterade
by Meghan Daum
What are the long-term effects of being called an intolerant hack, a feminazi, a despicable pig, and a stupid little twit on a daily basis?

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James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men reviewed by Leslie Jamison

Ethel Rohan’s Cut Through the Bone reviewed by Christopher Boucher

Stephen Burt on Littleton, New Hampshire

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“Long Since”
by Casey Walker

The Cabin Drawings
by Benjamin Weissman
A collaborative art project inspired by butt-prints and ski slopes, compiled by an expert snow-shoveler.

Schema: Top 8 Seriously Anguished Soul Singers
by Brady Welch

“Comics”
edited by Alvin Buenaventura

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Laurie Anderson
interviewed by Amanda Stern
One of America’s best and most loved performance artists in an interview that in some ways did and in some ways did not happen.

Denis Wood
interviewed by Blake Butler
A mapmaker at the forefront of changing the cartographic dogma discusses the arrogance and egotism inherent in the act of mapping.

Harry Mathews
in conversation with Laird Hunt
“I’m not going to ask you if you were in the CIA.”

Betsy Cohen
micro-interviewed by Catherine Lacey

Primer: A Homecoming
a new poem by Amanda DeMarco

The Process
by Alec Michod
A conversation with artist Fred Tomaselli about his painting Night Music for Raptors.

Real Life Rock Top Ten
by Greil Marcus

Stuff I’ve Been Reading
by Nick Hornby

Sedaratives
by Beth Littleford

What the Swedes Read
by Daniel Handler

Musin’s and Thinkin’s
by Jack Pendarvis