literature
Writers who put their names on things when most people wouldn't dare.
The Man Who Was Seventy-Five People
He cast a horoscope for a man who didn't exist and determined he'd been born nine and a half hours before his own conception.
The Stripper at the Typewriter
What was the headlining stripper at Minsky's doing at the dinner table with Auden, Britten, and McCullers?
The Poet Ford Hired
What happens when a car company asks a sixty-seven-year-old Pulitzer poet to name their next sedan?
The Woman Who Drowned in the Desert
How does a woman who spent her whole life trying to vanish into the Sahara end up killed by it in the one way no one saw coming?
Notre Grande Chasublerie
His ceilings were 1.65 metres high, which suited him perfectly. Every guest he ever received had to crouch.
The Diagnosis
What happens when a Soviet prison doctor has to diagnose the man who invented Russian absurdism?
The Man Who Drew the Curtains
He sailed to Tahiti, India, and Japan in 1920 and never left his cabin — so what exactly was he doing in there?
The Code That Wasn't
For decades scholars thought a Swiss novelist's tiny notebooks were a secret code written from inside an asylum.
The Necessary Jew
A terrified little man taught crafts to bored teenagers in Drohobycz and wrote two of the strangest books of the twentieth century, until the SS officer next door decided he wanted a Jew of his own.
Lights Off
She was being read by twelve million people a day and answered every fan letter by hand. So she dynamited a boulder on a treeless rock and built somewhere to hide.
Sei Shōnagon Had Opinions
What kind of person files pear blossoms under "most vulgar thing in the world" and then puts functional tweezers on the same list as the impossibility of lasting love?
The Woman Who Became Her Own Mystery
If the world's greatest mystery writer vanished for eleven days and registered at a hotel under her husband's mistress's name, what exactly was she solving?