Kathleen Rooney

At its worst, the doctrine of self-improvement can be dehumanizing — pressuring individuals to treat themselves like products or apps perpetually in need of touch-ups or updates, the better to...

Lucy Knisley’s new witty and intimate graphic memoir “Kid Gloves: Nine Months of Careful Chaos,” offers the refreshingly frank, utterly un-sugar-coated account of her struggles with infertility and a high-risk...

In “The Simple Art of Murder,” his 1950 essay on the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction, Raymond Chandler writes that the figure of the detective “must be a complete man...

Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. opens his profound, profane and propulsive debut short story collection, “Sacred Smokes,” with an epigraph from “Indians of Oregon, Plateau, and Plains.” Quoting an Indian...

Tortoise Books, the Chicago-based publisher of Jeremy T. Wilson’s debut short story collection, Adult Teeth, is itself named after a famous short story, the fable of the tortoise and the...

“The death of the author” is a concept put forth in a 1967 essay by Roland Barthes in which he argues that approaching a work with the author’s intentions or...

In his seminal play “The Importance of Being Earnest,” Oscar Wilde has the character Gwendolen declare, “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read...

The word “ode” gets thrown around a lot in relation to poetry, so it’s worth taking a look at Merriam-Webster’s definition of the term: “a lyric poem usually marked by...