When a book passes into the public domain, it means not only that it’s available for adapting and remixing, but for reprinting and reselling with a brand new cover. Some of these covers are .… | Continue reading
Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Machines Like Me, is out now from Doubleday. * What time of day do you write? The morning. My philosopher friend Galen Strawson divides humanity into those who feel… | Continue reading
Virginia Woolf became a novelist in part because, through imaginative projection and writerly craft, fiction enabled her to feel close to her dead mother. Sustained versions of Julia Stephen occur … | Continue reading
Thomasina: Yes, we must hurry if we are going to dance. Valentine: And everything is mixing the same way, all the time, irreversibly . . . Septimus: Oh, we have time, I think. Valentine: . . . til… | Continue reading
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. –Mary Oliver, “Sometimes” * When I was a new-to-practice oncology nurse, I was a walking, talking ball of anxiety. There… | Continue reading
The American Library in Paris sits in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Its collection of 100,000 books is spread over three stories. Members from 60 countries can work at long tables or whisper at t… | Continue reading
Of course I stole the title for this talk from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a so… | Continue reading
The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is concerned with building machines that have the same capabilities that human beings have. If the ultimate dream of AI is ever realized, then we will have… | Continue reading
How should we read? The S-word makes it sound, like it or not, like a moral injunction—deep, passionate and enthusiastic readers we may well be, there nonetheless remains something about the way we… | Continue reading
This is how the birth of the eel comes about: it takes place in a region of the northwest Atlantic Ocean called the Sargasso Sea, a place that is in every respect suitable for the creation of eels.… | Continue reading
They are watching us. They know I’m writing these words. They know you are reading them. Governments and hundreds of corporations are spying on you and me, and everyone we know. Every minute of eve… | Continue reading
The Hippocratic books now known as the Epidemics are entitled in Greek epidemiai. This title does not refer to epidemics as we now painfully recognize them, individual diseases which are spread wid… | Continue reading
During your first year of teaching, a plague of grasshoppers invades the Mojave Desert. When you walk from the mobile home classroom where you teach an unruly crew of seventh grade language arts st… | Continue reading
There is no literary spy—and perhaps no literary character, full stop—more famous than James Bond, which should already be enough of an argument for any aspiring writer, but particularly any aspiri… | Continue reading
Wobble. Wibblewobble. Wibblewobblewibblewobble. I have finally plucked up the courage. Ten times in Venice and in a gondola for the first time. As I drink my coffee early in the morning on the corn… | Continue reading
Europe was a new land, and one ripe for conquest, and a warm reception on the northern shores of the Mediterranean further strengthened the bond between human and feline . . . or so we thought. Cen… | Continue reading
The dates of voting rights victories can sound like ancient history, but the 1965 Voting Rights Act gave many people alive today their first opportunity to vote, and other groundbreaking voting law… | Continue reading
When you publish a novel, people want to know who your influences are, just as a low-level criminal is told to cough up the names of the masterminds who actually dreamed up the scheme that got him … | Continue reading
Our current pandemic is not a first excursion into remote learning. Many may know of the origins story of calculus, born over Isaac Newton’s retreat to the countryside from Cambridge University dur… | Continue reading
American police, and Trump’s Federales, deploy tear gas to quell protestors, and thereby catalyze further unrest. Eloquent writers have explored the immorality of these police actions, including ho… | Continue reading
We live in unreal times. I wake up in the middle of a global pandemic to watch a reality-TV president spout conspiracy theories while dystopian corporations enact new science fiction tech. In this … | Continue reading
As a senior designer at Alfred A. Knopf, I feel incredibly lucky. Odds are, if I’m passed a manuscript to read, I will love it. And when I’m assigned a novel by a first-time author, an excited, anx… | Continue reading
Americans have surrounded themselves with crappy things: consumer goods that are typically low priced, poorly made, composed of inferior materials, lacking in meaningful purpose, and not meant to l… | Continue reading
Howard Zinn wrote one of the most popular books on American history ever. A People’s History of the United States has sold an astonishing two million copies since its first publication in 1980. The… | Continue reading
American domestic life circa 2020 feels far removed from that of the 19th-century Londoner or Liverpudlian. But Victorian notions of décor and comfort crossed the Atlantic and held sway in statesid… | Continue reading
Last year, I put together this list of the most iconic poems in the English language; it’s high time to do the same for short stories. But before we go any further, you may be asking: What do… | Continue reading
A Wild Sheep Chase, Alfred Birnbaum’s English translation of Murakami’s novel Hitsuji wo meguru bōken, was warmly received in the US when it was first published by Kodansha International (KI) in 19… | Continue reading
The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about t… | Continue reading
This past weekend in Japan, Haruki Murakami released his new story collection Ichininshō Tansū (The First Person Singular). The collection comprises eight stories, seven of which were first publish… | Continue reading
On July 9, 1844, a letter from a dead man arrived at the post office in Burlington, Wisconsin, forty miles southwest of Milwaukee. Addressed to “Mr. James J. Strang,” it had been postmarked three w… | Continue reading
The Ayn Rand Institute, a nonprofit(??) “devoted to applying Rand’s ideas to current issues and seeking to promote her philosophical principles of reason, rational self-interest and laissez-f… | Continue reading
Ever since Trump was elected, we have been living through things that we would find overplayed and unbelievable in fiction and film and they keep on coming. Sunday night they came in the form of a … | Continue reading
One year after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia (and a full year before the New York Times decided it was a good idea to publish an excerpt from Der Führer’s poisonous opus), celebrated write… | Continue reading
At the Renaissance Society of America Conference The cultural magnificence of the vinaigrette was revealed to me in a paper read by Timothy Tomasik, an accomplished scholar of 16th-century French f… | Continue reading
As she wakes in the morning, Ella asks Alexa to brew her coffee, check the weather, and order groceries from Whole Foods to be delivered to her apartment that evening. Ella is 26 years old and has … | Continue reading
The Sensuous Dirty Old Man (1971) is credited to “Dr. A”… but “the secret is out,” admits a paperback edition, naming the author as Isaac Asimov, “undoubtedly the best writer in America” per … | Continue reading
Merlin Sheldrake’s new book Entangled Life looks at the complex world of fungi, its adaptive ability, and its interconnectedness with all other forms of life. He spoke with Robert Macfarlane,… | Continue reading
Vincent van Gogh’s art is known even in remote corners of the world, but his dramatic life story has often obscured the richness and complexity of his work. In Vincent’s Books I attempt to tell thi… | Continue reading
This essay is based on interviews with Chomsky conducted by C.J. Polychroniou, Amy Goodman, and Harrison Samphir. * History is all too rich in records of horrendous wars, indescribable torture, mas… | Continue reading
Once upon a time Ken Kesey wrote an endearing tale about a wily squirrel and a hungry bear. The unlikely picture book was one of two written by Kesey nearly three decades after his well-known 1962 … | Continue reading
Personally, I find solace in long novels. The good ones always seem to create space for the reader: space to sink and settle, and time to really learn what you’re dealing with, both in terms … | Continue reading
Does an event have to be true in order to be accepted as true, or does belief in the truth of an event already make it true, even if the thing that supposedly happened did not happen? And what if, … | Continue reading
When air is completely still and cool, we can enjoy bright starlit nights and the respite from manic combustion. But when calms are warm, or go on too long beyond the dawn, they become awkward and … | Continue reading
Usually a question like this is theoretical: What would it be like to find your town, your state, your country, shut off from the rest of the world, its citizens confined to their homes, as a conta… | Continue reading
Of course, books can be a balm in these terrifying times—but as the surge in sales of plague-related literature reveals, sometimes all we want to read are books that speak directly to our terrifyin… | Continue reading
Here’s a dull joke (all jokes with semicolons are): a novelist spends her twenties not going out or talking to people very much; a few years later, she finds her sudden and primary responsibility t… | Continue reading
I didn’t initially think I would be writing from a chicken’s point of view. I was writing a novel that centered around an industry farm of a million egg-laying chickens. It was a lot of chickens, a… | Continue reading
A baby’s face is the face of promise, but it is also the face of provenance. To look at the face of an infant is to easily look beyond the staggering reality of the present—the individuation of a f… | Continue reading