We believe students and readers everywhere deserve a great and free modern library, inside of which they can get deliriously, entertainingly, profoundly lost. And found.

Stories

Nonfiction
Learning to Write
by Vikram Chandra
I came to computers while trying to run away from literature.
Nonfiction
Lexington: America’s Legendary Racehorse
by Kim Wickens
Horses in those days were celebrities in their own right.
Story of the Week
Literature as Pleasure, Pleasure as Literature
by Joyce Carol Oates
“A book is an ax,” Franz Kafka once said, “for the frozen sea within.”
Spring Contest Winners
Local Color
by Christopher Kempf
Their breath rose in small clouds. Their flag rippled above them.
Nonfiction
Losing My Mother
by Kate Small
“We know what can happen,” Mike says. “We choose to do this.”
Narrative on the Road
Malaga
by Richard Smith
We skip across the surface like a stone slung by a giant travel agent.
Nonfiction
My Whole Entire Life
by Richard Smith
I wanted to be a citizen of the empire called American Express.
Nonfiction
Mentors in General, Peter Taylor in Particular
by John Casey
Mentors can suggest to you what more you are capable of.
Nonfiction
My Daughter and God
by Justin Cronin
My wife had time to form a thought: I have killed my daughter.
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Narrative Taste
My Dinner Chez Monsieur Paul
by Sylvie Bigar
Dining at Bocuse wasn’t about food, but about pleasure in all its forms.
Story of the Week
My First Book: “Treasure Island”
by Robert Louis Stevenson
The future of the book began to appear among imaginary woods.
Story of the Week
On Marriage
by Robert Louis Stevenson
The proper qualities of each sex are eternally surprising to the other.
Story of the Week
My Fourth Fall
by Pia Z. Ehrhardt
What were the unsafe things to say even in a thirty-year marriage?
Nonfiction
My Mess of Conflicting Emotions
by S. E. Daniels
Though I’ve never killed anything myself, I’ve been complicit.
Nonfiction
Notes Nearing Ninety
by Donald Hall
At nineteen you were six-foot-two. At ninety-one you will be two-foot-six.
Nonfiction
Notes on Time
by Jayne Anne Phillips
Time, now more than ever, is of the essence. Time is all there is.
Classics
Notes on Writing a Novel
by Elizabeth Bowen
The ideal way of presenting character is to invite perception.
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Nonfiction
Nothing More
by Marc Petersen
This is all there is. Nothing else. No heaven and no hell, okay?
Masterpieces
Odessa, Mon Amour
by James Salter
He wrote and rewrote endlessly, and rose at night to reread pages.
Story of the Week
Of Companions and Flatterers
by Sir Richard Steele
There is hardly a rich man in the world who has not such a friend.
Nonfiction
Of God and His Enemies
by Hal Crowther
Logic is such an elegant weapon; and religion, such an easy target.
Story of the Week
Of the Meaning of Progress
by W. E. B. Du Bois
The longing to know hovered like a star above this child-woman.
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Story of the Week
Of the Novel
by Guy de Maupassant
I do not intend in these pages to put in a plea for this little novel.
Story of the Week
Oh
by Marianne Boruch
Children, this is what a bad dream looks like, our teacher said.
Nonfiction
Oil
by Rick Bass
I sometimes have to laugh because even now, as a middle-aged man.
Nonfiction
On Fame and the Writer
by Stephen Spender
Perhaps more than ever writers may have two kinds of fame.
Story of the Week
On Good Resolutions
by Alfred George Gardiner
For my part, I do not want a Happy Christmas: I want a Merry Christmas.
Nonfiction
On Luck: A Screenwriter’s Education
by Bill Barich
I found it impossible not to imagine a radiant future for myself.
Nonfiction
On Nancy Hale’s “Flotsam”
by Ann Beattie
This is a crafty story and things are not what they seem to be.
Story of the Week
On the Art of Fiction
by Willa Cather
That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process.