At a time when the notion of a poetic career—with its requisite curriculum vitae, residencies, prize panels, and sabbaticals—has long been in ascendancy, it can seem almost quaint to recall that poverty or a sad demise was once a not-uncommon fate for a poet (think Keats, Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane). John Wieners met such an end in 2002, when he collapsed returning from a party in Beacon Hill, Boston. He was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where, lacking identification, he lay unconscious for days and then was removed from the respirator. Almost until the very

Lucia Berlin was born November 12, 1936, and she died on November 12 sixty-eight years later, which suggests a tidiness to her time on this earth that her time on this earth certainly did not exhibit. She lived in Alaska, Chile, Mexico, and the American Southwest, loved her sister and loathed her mother, had severe scoliosis and a very large drinking problem. She was forever getting married to cads or addicts and had four sons whom she pretty much raised herself, supporting them through a series of crummy jobs—switchboard operator, ER attendant, cleaning woman. From the ’70s through the ’90s,

Eugene O’Neill has been heralded as the father of American theater since at least 1962. That year, Arthur and Barbara Gelb’s O’Neill championed the Irish American playwright as a hero and crowned Long Day’s Journey into Night the greatest American play—and also the most autobiographical.

Joy Williams wears sunglasses day and night. She does not own a computer and she corresponds by postcard. She can be irascible in interviews (one poor interviewer admitted he “cringe[d]” to publish the interview uncut because of her little digs at him). A real live kook, she is widely admired by writers with even the faintest interest in the avant-garde, and her books have been finalists for major prizes, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, because she is a fiery writer with a sharp humor and a dark energy and because her sentences are weird, funny, and

Few authors remain at once as familiar and excitingly original over the course of a career as Muriel Spark. From book to book, an odd familiarity combines with a scrappy sense of a new beginning. For the neophyte, there’s no bad place to jump in; for the veteran, there’s always something new to explore. In one of the interviews reprinted in Hidden Possibilities, an excellent new collection of critical responses to the Scottish-born author’s work, Spark praises Edna O’Brien for the freshness of her writing; it’s a compliment that could be paid to Spark at any point in her career.

Ariel Schrag, now in her mid-thirties, has been a force in gay pop culture since she was fourteen. A prolific cartoonist, she started publishing her own autobiographical comic-book series, Awkward, her freshman year at Berkeley High, in 1995. Schrag produced a differently titled comic-book series for each year she was in high school—Definition, Potential, and Likewise followed Awkward. The appeal of her comics, which chronicle her own coming out, includes a razor-like attention to details of teenagers’ lives, as well as a richly expressed (you guessed it) awkwardness. Her comics attend to masturbation, body image, sex, drugs, family, and biology

Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Stealth begins with a mundane scene that captures the particular, weighty tedium of everyday life in Cairo:

When crack cocaine enters a story, we usually brace ourselves for a downfall. The tales of those who have fallen prey to the drug are so familiar that they have taught even nonusers to consider themselves experts. Many speak knowingly of the crack addict—gaunt, unkempt, willing to do anything for the next fix. In James Hannaham’s second novel, Delicious Foods, crack figures heavily in two ways. Darlene Hardison, a young widow, is an addict, and Scotty, who narrates a good deal of the novel, is crack personified (that’s right: Crack is one of the novel’s narrators). This is a welcome