By the latter half of the decade the slide was irreversible: if Blockbuster had been injurious, Netflix was a cancer.  And so was On Demand, Hulu, and the thousand other ways we now put stories before our eyes.

As a reader and writer, the current moment is endlessly confusing to me. Sometimes I feel like I’m on a one-man mission to save publishing, buying books weekly from indies and chains alike, for the sake not only of my future work, but that of future writers, young people far from urban centers, dreaming up stories in Texas or Idaho or Michigan.

When I was a child traveling to my family’s ancestral home in Northern Greece, we would always come to a point in the road where the left went north to Albania and the right went northeast into the Pindus mountains.

Wojnarowicz was deeply aware of the trajectory he shared with the youthful and precocious Rimbaud.

Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking never quite breaks the laws of physics, but she is an impossible creature, a fantasy of empowerment: rich, self-confident, unnaturally strong, perpetually delighted, never compromising, never defeated. She's Lisbeth Salander's oldest literary relative and the original girl who played with fire.

Have we already lost interest in the Gulf oil spill, or is it possible that the report itself is to blame for our fading interest?

The Internet was the big bogeyman, the great scapegoat of 2010.

Marketing a book is more of an uphill battle than ever in our forget-me-now culture of constant media noise. And so were born internet literary stunts.

The comic is vibrant, warm, and beautifully drawn; unlike its staggering peers, it’s outrageously alive.

I ride to school and whisper words like "threshold," "doomsday," and "willow tree."

Finishing a story – a good, well-written story – about a character both well developed and personally intriguing, and knowing that another story about that very same character is out there somewhere, has become, for me, one of the best feelings in the world.

Fiction can be depressing, of course, but there's something intrinsically optimistic about the process by which tragedy and frailty are turned into art.

Dennis Hopper is the neoliberal consensus, the crazy person waving the Glock around is the financial industry, the bullet is a two trillion dollars in losses, and the poor hostage being jerked hither and yon is you and me.

Is it better to let a friendship end naturally or to sustain it on Facebook life support?

Reading about one’s hometown doesn’t transport so much as extend, enlarging our maps with each page.