A chair that he can sit cross-legged in and a photo of Victor Hugo’s sarcophagus: step inside Luc Sante’s writing room.

Smith selected 50 emerging poets for the Best New Poets 2015. The anthology includes work by a child-welfare lawyer, a new father, and a style blogger and poems that investigate Adam and Eve, a grandmother's cooking, and the ways nature reminds us of our shared humanity.

In The New Yorker, Batuman explores the politics and people behind recent excavations in Turkey.

In this travel piece, Franzen writes about how the smallness of rare birds taught him to appreciate the expansiveness of East Africa.  

Joseph talks about letting the actors in his show Guards at the Taj make edits to his script and scenes so painful "the whole audience needed a drink."

Van der Vliet Oloomi's new fiction in Guernica gets to the core of one woman's inner desperation. 

McDermott's new story in The New Yorker explores one desperate man's struggles and a nun's convictions in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn.

In The New Yorker, McDermott on her story "These Short, Dark Days" and why she doesn’t think of herself a religious writer.

Lauren Groff writes that Johnson "is always perceptive and brave; his lines always sing and strut and sizzle and hush and wash and blaze over the reader."