Mark Mcgurl News Today

When N. Scott Momaday speaks, with a voice like a great cathedral organ, everyone listens. It was with this voice that Momaday preserved oral traditions of his Kiowa tribe.

The suggestion that Beloved, Toni Morrison’s acclaimed novel about slavery and its afterlives, is also a parable about the publishing industry would be bizarre, even offensive—if, that is, Morrison herself hadn’t explicitly suggested it. For years, Morrison had felt not merely penned in by her career as an editor at the publishing giant Random House; she had felt indentured, “held in contempt—to be played with when our masters are pleased, to be dismissed when ...

Writers have increasingly adopted the neutered rhetoric of brand management to meet consumer demand for instant gratification through therapeutic literary experiences, repressing creativity and diversity.

Hilary Plum situates Dan Sinykin’s “Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature” among the ecosystem of small presses in the literary world....

Sophomore Ava Jeffs is the latest student to teach a class on the pop star

The Robert Penn Warren Center for Humanities began its Novel Seminar Series on Sept. 1. For the first event, Dr. Teresa Goddu, professor of English and American studies and faculty head of E. Bronson Ingram Residential College, delivered a presentation on contemporary climate fiction and its intersection with race and genre.  The Novel Seminar Series...

Colson Whitehead’s half-true Harlem

Stanford University will offer a student-led class centered on Taylor Swift's songwriting and storytelling.

Stanford University will offer a student-led class centered on Taylor Swift's songwriting and storytelling.

The course was designed by a Stanford student named Ava Jeffs as part of the school’s Student Initiated Course program.