A troubled teen who seeks refuge from the demon of addiction is also a symbol for a host of social ills in post-socialist Chile and present-day America.

Reading David Sedaris is like watching an aerialist. His famed humor pieces take escalating risks while never failing to bring off smooth, astonishing landings.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie prefers thorny, resistant characters to likeable ones. She talks about why readers shouldn't settle for characters that are less than difficult.

Inspired by an iconic American image, Marisa Silver's Mary Coin imagines the fabric of life behind Dorothea Lange's depression-era photograph, "Migrant Mother."

Alice Fulton wants to "dirty" lyric poetry by making it bear witness to the grievous geo-politics of the present.

Rae Armantrout's poems apprehend the world as a place charged by the nonexistent supernatural. For her, the eerie thing is that ghosts don't exist.

Pura Lopez-Colomé's poetry, translated by Forrest Gander, envisions the body as a mystically rich reservoir of experience and language.

Aleksandar Hemon takes us though his life from his childhood in Sarajevo -- from the public tragedy of warfare to the private catastrophe of the loss of his child.

Margaret Atwood has embraced the frontiers of online literary culture. She reflects on her exploration of literary innovation and why Hermes is the patron of the new(s).

A novel of multiple voices, motorcycles, and swift zigzags between separate times and places.