David L. Ulin

It had to happen sooner or later: A writer in Seattle has started “The James Franco Review.” But wait — the journal is not devoted to the study of James Franco, or to publishing his so-called literary work. The idea, instead, is to create a space for writers to be bold,...

I only met Judith Kitchen once. It’s my loss. Kitchen, who died last week at 73 of cancer, was a rare spirit, both on the page and in the world. Teacher, essayist, critic, she and her husband and partner Stan Rubin ran the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma,...

Lydia Millet's new novel, "Mermaids in Paradise" (W.W. Norton: 290 pp., $25.95), operates on a variety of levels, from parody to romance to (in its own way) oddball thriller, tracing a couple on their honeymoon who get embroiled in high-stakes drama after they discover actual mermaids...

Denis Johnson tends to let his work speak for itself. Since the publication of his debut novel, "Angels," in 1983 he's written some of the most essential books in contemporary American literature, but he doesn't often talk about them. "My general policy," he tells me in an email, "is to duck...

The work of Vivian Maier reminds us of how close to the edge we are. For many years a nanny in New York and Chicago, she left an archive of something like 150,000 photographs when she died in 2009 at age 83, and has become an emblem of the hidden life, the native talent, the multitudes we all...

Does publishing matter? Of course it does. That's one reason the dispute between Amazon.com and Hachette is so significant, because it has broader implications for the ways books are released and sold.

“The Honest Pint” No. 22 arrived in the mail this past weekend, the latest issue of a monthly series of broadsides on poetics, published by Tavern Books in Portland, Ore. and edited by the poet Matthew Dickman. This month’s issue features two items: a...

Assaf Gavron's 2010 novel "Almost Dead" does something I would have thought impossible — it makes satire out of terrorism. The story of a man who becomes an Israeli national hero after surviving three attacks in a single week, the book offers a sharply ironic look at the intersection of...