You know that old saying about how there are only a few plots in the world? And every story falls into one of those seven--or twelve--or twe...

I just reread Connie Willis's essay "Learning to Write Comedy or Why It's Impossible and How to Do It" from Writing Scienc...

Stephen Crane, " The Price of the Harness " (1898) from Stephen Crane: Prose & Poetry : Here's the short version: Stephe...

A town is menaced. An outsider comes to town. The outsider may be wild, but he's the only hope the town has for dealing with the menace....

I want to be clear that when I say "Early Gothics," I mean more like The Castle of Otranto (1764) than Underworld  (2003). Maybe w...

Walt Whitman, " One Wicked Impulse! " (1845/1882) from Walt Whitman: Poetry & Prose : Much like Whitman's "Wild Fra...

You know those things that seem like good ideas at the time? Yeah, taking a week off from sugary foods never seemed like that. But at least ...

Imagine how excited high schoolers would be to read this! Gatsby is a guy with a secret: on certain nights, he turns into a wolf-monster. (I...

Herman Melville, " The Armies of the Wilderness " (1866) from The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It : In my b...

Matt Fraction's Hawkeye is the sort of comic book that everyone in comics is talking about. It's a superhero comic book--sort of. As...

A lot of genres get defined by their trappings rather than by the real skeleton going on underneath: it's like defining birds as "t...

Thornton Wilder, " The Drunken Sisters " (1957) from Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater : If all you kno...

By now I hope you'd have faith that I could use enough tortured logic to connect these two films: one, a mobbed-up showbiz comedy about ...