Susan Cheever on Louisa May Alcott: “A writer who refused conventional ideas of women’s roles”

Christopher Carduff on the “everyday sublime” of John Updike’s short stories

James Wood: Reality, not realism, in three mid-period Bellow novels

Bill Littlefield on how sportswriter W. C. Heinz listened to athletes—and knew their glory was fleeting

J. D. McClatchy on Thornton Wilder’s “mesmerizing revisionist method of story-telling”