Beautiful writing from Rebecca Solnit, that encapsulates what I’ve been trying to say: You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a … | Continue reading
Reading Tristram Shandy in an Age of Distraction by Sarah Moorhouse. Originally published 30 Jan, 2023.Scrolling through random social media pages, Wikipedia articles or company websites, I realized that the internet has primed us to experience time the way that Tristram does.Rep … | Continue reading
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the publication of “The Waste Land,” we invited four writers and academics—Beci Carver, Jahan Ramazani, Robert Crawford, and David Barnes—to discuss… | Continue reading
As technology becomes more integrated into our daily lives, cyberpunk—the sci-fi subgenre that’s been preoccupied with the seemingly inevitable singularity of flesh and machine since before we had … | Continue reading
Blake Butler had given up on publishing Decade. He’d written the novel in 2008, and its complicated structure and dense language rendered it virtually unpublishable by both commercial and avant-gar… | Continue reading
“Ladies seem to be particularly subject to arachnophobia,” observed the English parson and natural historian the Reverend John George Wood in 1863. If a spider scuttled across his drawi… | Continue reading
Curiously trial by jury was voluntary in medieval England. However, if you did refuse to stand trial, the authorities would crush you between two heavy stones until you either acquiesced or died. I… | Continue reading
Late-capitalist “efficiency culture” has been ruining things for almost 20 years now: I truly do not care how tech CEOs spend every 5-minute interval of their 20-hour days maximizing their brain an… | Continue reading
One of my favorite Virginia Cowles anecdotes concerns Lloyd George reading her article on the Spanish Civil War in the Sunday Times and being so impressed that he quoted it in Parliament, before as… | Continue reading
In our habitual fantasies, writers do nothing but sit at small café tables, sometimes meeting with their friends, other times gazing wistfully into a pint or swirling an espresso before they scribb… | Continue reading
The following first appeared in Lit Hub's The Craft of Writing newsletter-sign up here. * One challenge I frequently grapple with in my work is how to write vividly, intimately, and fairly about people who I have never met.(lithub.com) | Continue reading
“I am looking for a way to say I love you that matters. Before there is nothing left to say but I miss you, into the wind.” –Melissa Febos, “Iowa Bestiary,” from The World as We Knew It * On June 1… | Continue reading
On April 15, 1862, Emily Dickinson did not set out to write the most important letter in American literary history. But many scholars believe that’s exactly what she did. In Amherst, Massachusetts—… | Continue reading
The first case of tree theft I ever encountered occurred within the stands of ancient old-growth on the southwest shores of Vancouver Island, in Ditidaht territory. One day in the spring of 2011, a… | Continue reading
Nowadays it seems any writer of literary fiction must have some opinion on the economic organization of society under “late-stage capitalism,” and yet it’s rare to see an honest treatment of work o… | Continue reading
1. In May 2018, Sundar Pichai of Google announced that their artificial intelligence, Duplex AI, had passed the Turing test. A robotic assistant could make an appointment in a voice that possessed … | Continue reading
Philip Roth, one of the most important writers of the last century, would have been 86 years old today. He was prolific, much-lauded, much-loved (by some), and much-derided (by others)—but whatever… | Continue reading
In August of 1934, Eudora Welty applied for admission to Berenice Abbott’s photography class at the New School of Social Research in New York City. In the letter she aligned herself against the pic… | Continue reading
Joe Fassler talked to a few writers and then compiled all of their advice into 7 tips. I don’t write fiction, but as someone who writes pretty much every day I can heartily agree with advice # 1 about making time and # 7 about finding the joy. If I were adding one more tip […]✚ | Continue reading
“We are inextricably part of Europe,” Margaret Thatcher told Britain in 1975. “Neither Mr. Foot nor Mr. Benn”—the chief Brexiteers of the day—”nor anyone else will eve… | Continue reading
Let’s get our priorities right. Another American mass shooting. Yawn. A fresh Russian offensive in Ukraine. Yawn. The Heard vs Depp defamation case concludes with a $15 million payout to Johnny Dep… | Continue reading
The obvious problem with this glorification of American history that entranced me as a boy is that the egalitarian impulse that drove the Revolution didn’t apply to everyone. In my mind, that probl… | Continue reading
I turned the calf-bound cover of the book with a mix of anticipation and nervousness. Would this be the volume that finally gave me the evidence I was looking for? Or would it be yet another disapp… | Continue reading
It’s springtime again in New York City, which makes me think of You’ve Got Mail. “You don’t want to miss New York in the spring,” Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) advises Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) late in the m… | Continue reading
I walk into a dark pizza restaurant, two books stashed in my purse, prepared to do something novel—attend my first Silent Book Club. The premise for this book club is simple. It’s a gathering of pe… | Continue reading
“My only sin is my skin. What did I do, to be so black and blue?” –Fats Waller, “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?” “Manhattan’s streets I saunter’d, pondering.” –Walt Whitman, “Manhattan’s … | Continue reading
As WWII entered its final year, Iris Murdoch and her best-friend Philippa Bosanquet (or Pip, as she was to Iris), were in the middle of a “quadrilateral tale” that, Iris reflected, “would make rath… | Continue reading
Ellen Ullman is a former software engineer and a writer. She started programming in the late 1970s and was a first-hand witness to the rise of the internet and the various tech booms and busts of t… | Continue reading
A couple of years ago, I was back home in Brooklyn between college semesters and reading Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy for my experimental fiction class (yes, yes, eye roll away). I had … | Continue reading
As I write this, the world’s wealthiest and noisiest man has made a characteristically loud public offer to buy the internet’s most memetic social media platform. Who knows whether Elon Musk’s much… | Continue reading
The headlines about the benefits of reading just keep coming. If you spend enough time online, you know reading purportedly makes you a better entrepreneur, happier, less stressed, and “more human.… | Continue reading
Languages change continually and in wide variety of ways. New words and phrases appear, while others fall into disuse. Words subtly, or less subtly, shift their meanings or develop new meanings, wh… | Continue reading
In honor of the 182nd anniversary of the first-ever appearance in print of O.K. (in The Boston Morning Post) I am here to start an internet copyediting war. As you can see, the original “O.K.” was … | Continue reading
I. The Cosmic Pathway The tony upper west side of Manhattan hosts a curious edifice known as the Rose Center for Earth and Space—a great glass cube within which enormous replicas of our solar syste… | Continue reading
Marcel Duchamp was born in Normandy in 1887, the third of six children of a notary. His brothers, Gaston and Raymond, were, respectively, twelve and eleven years his senior. A sister, Suzanne, two … | Continue reading
The Inca are most often remembered not for what they had but for what they didn’t have: the wheel, iron, a written language. This third lack has given rise to a paradox, the Inca paradox. Could it … | Continue reading
Maybe it has happened to you: a stranger catches your eye while you peruse the plant identification section of the library, or wander a mossy hillock speckled with Amanita bisporigera, or shuffle a… | Continue reading
Sixteen years after he devastated absolutely everyone with The Road, Cormac McCarthy is publishing two linked novels this fall: The Passenger on October 25 and Stella Maris on November 22. (Or you … | Continue reading
On January 21, 2017, the first full day in office of the new American president, Donald J. Trump—and the 67th anniversary of George Orwell’s death—the writer Orwell’s grim novel of a dystopian futu… | Continue reading
Wordplay is an embellisher. It prettifies poetry’s architecture. If rhyme and meter are its beams and joists, wordplay is the artfully chiseled balustrade, the pillowed window seat, the foliated ma… | Continue reading
When I first began to teach English Literature at university, here is how a lesson would typically begin: Me: Can everyone please turn to page 128 of Mrs Dalloway ? Student A: What page is it in t… | Continue reading
The Royal Geographical Society encouraged the Royal Navy to support British expeditions of Antarctica in the early 1900s. Heading from New Zealand, the expedition ship Discovery anchored off the co… | Continue reading
In 1905, physicists understood something of the laws governing two types of forces: those of electricity and magnetism and of gravity. We’ve seen that the laws of electricity and magnetism, encoded… | Continue reading
I can’t believe they’re just letting poets walk in off the street these days and do science. This is clearly the only logical explanation for the latest paper in Nature which, among other things, m… | Continue reading
Olga Tokarczuk’s twelfth book, the novel The Books of Jacob, first published in Poland in 2014 to great acclaim and considerable controversy, kicks off in 1752 in Rohatyn, in what is now western Uk… | Continue reading
It didn’t take long for Todd Lockwood to realize that a hierarchical book classification system would not work for the Brautigan Library. He was, after all, following through on Richard Braut… | Continue reading
Featured image: “Cloud Study,” by Jervis McEntee, Morris K. Jesup Fund, 1982 On Saturdays my dad had a Miller Lite, which sat on the woodpile while he split logs. He ordered split logs to be delive… | Continue reading
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) seems to me the authentic American apocalyptic novel, more relevant now than when it was written. The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dyi… | Continue reading