Meet the ten winners and read excerpts of their fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.

An interview with Kapka Kassabova about her book ‘Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe’

It has been said, erroneously, that poets are cat people, novelists dog people. In fact, lots of novelists are into cats.

From a September 4, 1990 letter from Sam Shepard to Johnny Dark.

In 1969, on a brief stopover in New York City, James Tate got high with one of Andy Warhol's Superstars and lamented city living to his friend back home

May Swenson’s “Daffodildo,” from our Summer 1993 issue, is an erotic-nature-poem-cum-tribute to Emily Dickinson—with flowers as sex toys.

A couple of years before The New Yorker’s longtime art editor, and brief cartoon editor, Lee Lorenz left the magazine, George Plimpton asked for his help assembling a portfolio of cartoons.

Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan at the age eighty-seven. Best known for Night, an autobiographical account of his experience in Nazi concentration camps toward the end of World War II, Wiesel, “more tha…

Prince died yesterday, at age fifty-seven, at his home, Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minnesota. The nation mourns: Minnesota Public Radio has dedicated its waves exclusively to the artist; purple rain adorns next week’s New Yorker cover; San Francisc…

A glossary of Boontling.Between 1880 and 1920, the residents of a relatively isolated Northern California town called Boonville spoke a secret language. Boontling, as the locals called it, was an elaborate jargon developed either by the men working t…

Your extensive library is all vanity: Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady warns against associating our books with status and considering them a marker of “the supposed growth of our intellect advertised in terms of shelf space.” Do you c…

James Tate, who wrote that the main challenge of poetry “is always to find the ultimate in the ordinary horseshit,” died yesterday in Massachusetts at age seventy-one. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the William Carlos …

Admire the tenacity of lit mags yet question their utility? The poet Stephen Burt argues that a new journal simply needs a raison d’être: it should seek to fill a “gap that earlier journals failed to fill, a new form of pleasure, a new kind of …

The owner of the most famous wheelbarrow in literature finally gets his due. Williams Carlos Williams was inspired in 1938 by the image of Thaddeus Marshall’s humble gardening implement left out in the rain, next to a flock of white chickens, and …

Stanley Mouse and the sixties psych-rock aesthetic. If I were to pick half a dozen of the definitive 1960’s people, Stanley Mouse would be one of them. —Bill GrahamRead any book about the sixties scene in San Francisco and you’ll run into Stanl…

Joan Didion is twice the man you’ll ever be, so suggests a recent article in The Millions. Her masculine superiority lies in the “glacial emotional distance” of her prose, which is better than yours. Her coolness astounds: in her essay, “On Sel…

George Plimpton, our founding editor, held the unofficial title of fireworks commissioner of New York City for some thirty years, but he hosted the hottest fireworks parties at his place in the Hamptons. When he died, in 2003, “his son, Taylor, fol…

In Detroit, the Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for generations, and now their home is worth a mere tenth of its mortgage. Oh, and it’s haunted—it’s been that way for fifty years, since Cha-Cha, the oldest son of Francis and Viola Turner, w…