Why’s This So Good?

I think it’s fair to say that most of America was shocked when news of Tiger Woods’ sex scandal broke in late 2009. I’m also pretty sure that anyone who…

In all likelihood, “The Cipher in Room 214” began with a fairly empty notebook. Most stories do, but in this case it probably looked like it was going to stay that…

The first time most people fall for E.B. White – certainly the first time I did – they are 6 or 7 or 8. In 1952, “Charlotte’s Web” made him the…

Last summer, John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote an essay about Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!, and amid his deft and borderline genius thoughts on the novel – “It…dramatize[s] historical consciousness itself, not just human lives but the…

Like the hook of a catchy song, David Ramsey's "I Will Forever Remain Faithful," from the Fall 2008 issue of The Oxford American, lures you in with a promise:1.Complex magazine: What…

Another writer introduced me to William Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris as if he were passing along a tip to eat in a restaurant with great food but clumsy waiters. “It’s not…

Sometime in my last year of college, James Brown played a show in the small East Coast city where I lived. I had all sorts of reasons not to go:…

It was a sideshow story whose horror was so extravagant that it bordered on vulgarity: On Feb. 16, 2009, a 14-year-old male chimpanzee named Travis, who had been raised from…

The friend who first sent me “The Bravest Woman in Seattle” told me it was stunning but also so unsettling that I should not read it before going to bed.She…

Four years ago, I began looking into the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was put to death by the state of Texas in 2004. Willingham had been convicted of…