Cults

The novelist on her loss of faith, youth culture, cult leaders, and spending time with syllables. 

“Literature is a way of establishing the humanness of others. It’s interested in the relationships between people, between authenticity and truth. That in itself has to make us better disposed to each other.”

The author of Cunt Norton and the forthcoming TV Sutras on how to mess with the poetry canon.

Ben Marcus’s Notable American Women chronicles the experiments of the Silentists, a group of women who strive to remove motion and sound from their lives in order to “cease to kill the sky.”

Novelist Stephen Wright does not simply tell a story. He takes the basic form of the novel and turns it inside out. His novels such as, Going Native, expose the strange and intriguing lives of characters that would normally fade into the background.

This is probably how it happened: William Clack-Herman, the anthropologist (popularly known as ‘Congo Bill’) was doing field research on the kinship systems of the pygmies of the equatorial rain forest.