The style guides say: keep your sentences short. Write cleanly, cut as many words as you can, and don’t overburden your reader’s short-term memory by delaying the arrival of the full stop. But some… | Continue reading
In an article titled “Bikers for Jesus,” Denis Johnson described himself flippantly as “a Christian convert, but one of the airy, sophisticated kind.” It was the sort of claim he made often, and it… | Continue reading
Translated from the Chinese by Thomas Moran. The first thing I should do, of course, is explain what I mean by “chaohuan,” which we are rendering in English as “ultra-unreal.” The literal meaning o… | Continue reading
As the year draws to a close, some of us like to look forward, and some of us backward—and some way backward. Last month, while working on the not-at-all-controversial Books That Defined the Decade… | Continue reading
Content warning: this article explores in detail suicidal ideation and methodology. In 1912, the Washington Post reported that an “Esthetic Nobleman” named Count August Seymore had planned to const… | Continue reading
Back when I was in high school in Sarajevo, my best friend was Zoka. We listened to the same bands, went to the same rock shows, found the same stupid things hilarious, played soccer together, skie… | Continue reading
The modern cure for insomnia is sleep restriction. The opposite of the rest cure, which feeds you up, the sleep diet keeps you hungry for sleep by keeping things lean. How lean, you might ask? Well… | Continue reading
For most of 2017, I was traveling around the country and occasionally abroad, attending conferences and sometimes giving speeches. It was a crazy, tumultuous year. Trump was president. The stock ma… | Continue reading
The typical image of an antiquarian bookstore—sitting quietly next to the banks of Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, in a modest red-shingled house near the Texas bayou, or hidden from view on the t… | Continue reading
John W. Campbell never became as famous as many of the writers he published, but he influenced the dreamlife of millions. For more than three decades, an unparalleled series of visions of the futur… | Continue reading
The private lives and personal habits of the great Russian writers are fascinating to me. They are held up as these great geniuses with their lofty thoughts and doorstop novels. But it turns out th… | Continue reading
It was out of love, or rather the desire to be loved, that led the 19 year-old William Henry Ireland to forge the “lost” Shakespeare play Vortigern and Rowena in 1796, not to fool the critics or re… | Continue reading
What exactly constitutes horror? Being spooked by the dark, and by the dead who might return in it, may have haunted the earliest human consciousness. Ceremonial burial predates all written history… | Continue reading
Until very recently there was a large foreign-language bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. called Schoenhof’s. Before it closed in 2017 it had been there for over 150 years. When I was in college—before … | Continue reading
In my earliest childhood memories of Los Angeles, I see an incinerator. My family and I lived on a dead-end street in East Hollywood, and the incinerator was a stout brick tower occupying an open s… | Continue reading
Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick a… | Continue reading
‘“And what is your particular field of work?” asked Berlioz. “I specialize in black magic.”’ If many Russian classics are dark and deep and full of the horrors of the blackness of the human soul (o… | Continue reading
We are in the midst of a significant cultural moment. Of course, there has rarely been a time when we haven’t been in the midst of a significant cultural moment. Donald Trump is president, and he i… | Continue reading
At their core, computers run software algorithms. Machine learning is a particular class of software algorithm. It’s basically a way of instructing a computer to learn by feeding it an enormous amo… | Continue reading
Lots of writers have kept corvids as pets and companions. Lord Byron kept a tame crow, I believe, though in fairness he also kept dogs, monkeys, peacocks, hens, an eagle, and a bear. The poet John … | Continue reading
At the U.S. Customs Service laboratory in New York City, where he was a supervisor, colleagues described chemist Jesse Park Battershall as a rather shy, meticulously cautious scientist. Yet Batters… | Continue reading
In 1921, 24-year-old William Faulkner had dropped out of the University of Mississippi (for the second time) and was living in Greenwich Village, working in a bookstore—but he was getting restless.… | Continue reading
A type specimen is, in biology, the first officially named version of an animal or plant that comes to represent in the characteristics of the species in the popular imagination. I have found, over… | Continue reading
The following is from the introduction to The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. * From Seppuku to Meltdown I once heard the story that when jazz drummer Buddy Rich was being admitted to a ho… | Continue reading
SCROOGLED Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him. –Cardinal Richelieu We don’t know enough about you. –Google CEO Eric Schmidt Greg la… | Continue reading
Plagiarism is always aspirational. In a wish to have someone else take their place, or supply their words, plagiarists generally steal something better than they might write themselves. In this way… | Continue reading
The Experiment In 1707, a boy no more than five years old left Axim, on the African Gold Coast, for Amsterdam, aboard a ship belonging to the Dutch West India Company. In those days, the trip to Eu… | Continue reading
Only connect. –E.M. Forster The act of taking on the perspective and feelings of others is one of the most profound, insufficiently heralded contributions of the deep-reading processes. Proust’s de… | Continue reading
The tumultuous events of 1968, the so-called “year that rocked the world,” have been very much in the news in 2018, their 50th anniversary. Though overlooked in many histories of the pe… | Continue reading
To hear some sticklers talk, you’d think that somewhere, in a classified location, there’s a top-secret grammar law library that houses the voluminous Grammar Penal Code: an official list of all th… | Continue reading
Last week, the literary lawsuit against Chad Harbach’s 2011 bestseller, The Art of Fielding, was dismissed. This week, Charles Green—the author of the unpublished novel Bucky’s 9th that Green… | Continue reading
A few years ago, Esquire put together a list that keeps rising from the dead like a zombie to haunt the Internet. It embodies the whole mission of that magazine so far as I can tell. The magazine’s… | Continue reading
Why do males exist? If you learned biology at school, your teachers will probably have told you it was because combining genes from different individuals—one male and one female—increases variation… | Continue reading
I’m not who I was supposed to be. No aspiring writer sets out to be a minor writer. I didn’t dream of growing up and writing books that sell modestly, are received quietly, and reviewed indifferent… | Continue reading
Warriors deal with death. They take life away from others. This is normally the role of God. Asking young warriors to take on that role without adequate psychological and spiritual preparation can … | Continue reading
A lot of people are waiting for something dramatic to happen, some line to be crossed, an epic event like the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller III that will allow them to say that now we ha… | Continue reading
Already, by 1960, Garry Winogrand was taking pictures that didn’t make any sense. Even now, we struggle to get a handle on them, but back then, before the pictures had altered the grammar of photog… | Continue reading