Casablanca is widely considered to be one of the best American movies ever made, and certainly it’s one of most enduringly popular films in history. There are a lot of reasons for this, critics will argue—the simple elegance of the plot; the crisp, memorable dialogue; the theme of love, sacrifice and redemption; the perfect casting. […]

Whenever a student comes to my office worried about whether he or she could write a “non-realistic” story for one of my classes, I always approvingly quote this passage from Flannery O’Connor’s essay “Writing Short Stories” (included in her classic collection of literary essays, Mystery and Manners): “Fiction is an art that calls for the […]