“Life— / I am of both your directions / Somehow remain hanging downward / the most / but strong as a cobweb” | Continue reading
“I’ve been collecting these theories of why writers write because so many writers have written about it.” | Continue reading
“I got a migraine on Friday, September 3rd, 2021, and another the following Sunday. Then: nothing.” | Continue reading
Some days after Barry’s death on December 25, 2020, I pulled every book of his I owned from the shelves around my apartment and stacked them on a corner of my desk. Then I walked down the hill to the used bookshop in the small Oregon town where I live and found several books of [ … | Continue reading
Don DeLillo, ca. 2011. Photograph by Thousandrobots A man who’s been called “the chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction” can be expected to act a little nervous.I met Don DeLillo for the first time in an Irish restaurant in Manhattan, for a … | Continue reading
Zohar Atkins, Nathan Goldman, David Heti, Sheila Heti, and Noreen Khawaja discuss the joke at the end of Woody Allen's Annie Hall. | Continue reading
Since 1976, Robert Caro has devoted himself to The Years of Lyndon Johnson, a landmark study of the thirty-sixth president of the United States. The fifth and final volume, now underway, will presumably cover the 1964 election, the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the la … | Continue reading
"How could I become a better smeller?" | Continue reading
Billy Wilder, one of American cinema’s premiere writer-directors, has always maintained that movies are “authored,” and has always felt that much of a film’s direction ideally should take place in the writing. Like many of the medium’s great fi … | Continue reading
Whip up a satirical murder menu from the first feminist detective novel. | Continue reading
Packed with strange details and beautiful quirks, Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel allows us to imagine that our world could be different. | Continue reading
Ernest Hemingway, ca. 1939. Photograph by Lloyd ArnoldHEMINGWAYYou go to the races? INTERVIEWERYes, occasionally. HEMINGWAYThen you read the Racing Form ... There you have the true art of fiction. —Conversation in a Madrid cafe, May, 1954 Ern... | Continue reading
Steinberg and George Plimpton discuss how the form of sports reflects on nationhood. | Continue reading
"What I really thought was that if people knew how difficult it was, no one would attempt it, that there must be a conspiracy of silence among authors, since this misconception that everyone had a book in them was so widely held," writes Tabitha Lasley. | Continue reading
When I was seventeen, I drove to Missoula, Montana, to learn how to fly-fish. The town is one of the best places to fish in the country. Rivers with names like the Bitterroot and Blackfoot crisscross the valley harboring trout the size of walruses. I spent that summer learnin … | Continue reading
"Writers don’t want biographers, and I know Sebald wouldn’t want me." | Continue reading
In Phillip Lopate’s introduction to ‘The Contemporary American Essay,’ he describes the form as one “uniquely amenable to the processing of uncertainty.” | Continue reading
The only evidence that Pessoa actually read ‘Ulysses,’ or enough of it to know that he wanted to read no more, is the laconic commentary he scribbled, in Portuguese, on a scrap of paper. | Continue reading
Jan Morris boards a Mediterranean cruise and discovers the geriatric passengers are more lively than expected. | Continue reading
The moon was born four and a half billion years ago. It’s been goddess, god, sister, bridge, vessel, mother, lover, other. | Continue reading
A new show at the Museum of Modern Art showcases the work of Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante, an influential group of photographers in midcentury São Paulo. | Continue reading
Vladimir Nabokov lives with his wife Véra in the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, a resort city on Lake Geneva which was a favorite of Russian aristocrats of the last century. They dwell in a connected series of hotel rooms that, like their houses and apartm … | Continue reading
In an excerpt from Pardis Mahdavi’s book ‘Hyphen,’ the debate over New-York’s historical hyphen becomes a grammatical battle with vast social implications. | Continue reading
Shortly after I picked up ‘Dead Souls,’ my mother died a gruesome, absurd death, and I quickly found that Gogol’s surrealism was not so surreal after all. | Continue reading
Hanna Diyab, the man responsible for “Aladdin,” remained obscure until the discovery of his memoir, which appears today in English for the first time. | Continue reading
Jonathan Meiburg on biodiversity, the striated caracara, and the similarities between playing music and paying close attention to birds. | Continue reading
Twenty-five years ago, Sven Birkerts published “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.” Have his fears and projections come to pass? | Continue reading
Upon hearing of Italo Calvino’s death in September of 1985, John Updike commented, “Calvino was a genial as well as brilliant writer. He took fiction into new places where it had never been before, and back into the fabulous and ancient sources of narrative.&rdq … | Continue reading
The muses don’t sing to cover letter writers. | Continue reading
My library is a response to the void of my parents’ house: there are traces of all the public libraries I’ve visited since childhood. | Continue reading
Whatever else living in unprecedented times does to us, it leaves traces behind in our bodies, even if we never fell ill. | Continue reading
‘The Great Gatsby’ is not a book about people, per se. Secretly, it’s a novel of ideas. | Continue reading
We know nothing. Not much, at any rate. In total, all the poems and fragments that have reached us add up to no more than six hundred lines. | Continue reading
Weather, a natural force magnified by island circumstance, is the cold blood of Iceland. Weather with its amoral, wanton violence is lethal here. | Continue reading
Verdigris was such a beautiful color, it was hard for painters to resist, even when they knew it would render their works mortal. | Continue reading
Jan Morris was born James Humphrey Morris on October 2, 1926, in Somerset, England. As she recalled in her memoir, Conundrum, “I was three or four when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.” First intimations. But she wou … | Continue reading
How one museum guard at the Cloisters may have uncovered a truth about the Unicorn Tapestries no one else had seen. | Continue reading
We are designed, scientists realized, not only to remember, but also to forget. The first of the neurotransmitters discovered was named anandamide, Sanskrit for bliss. | Continue reading
Kurt Vonnegut, ca. 1972. Photograph by PBS This interview with Kurt Vonnegut was originally a composite of four interviews done with the author over the past decade. The composite has gone through an extensive working over by the subject himself, who looks upon his own spoke … | Continue reading
Grant Geissman chronicles the origins of EC Comics’s horror titles, including the gruesome, bone-chilling ‘Tales from the Crypt.’ | Continue reading
Amid recent renovations on Park Row, construction workers discovered artifacts of news reporters inside the walls—papers and typewriters. Who knows what ghosts might lurk there still? | Continue reading
I’ve been thinking on russet lately, this color of oak and Rembrandt and austerity. Its terra-cotta earthiness fits my mood. | Continue reading
Told almost entirely in unattributed dialogue, William Gaddis’s ‘J R’ is not for the faint of heart and mind or the weak of concentration. | Continue reading
Living his last days in a filthy, crowded, freezing prison cell, Max Jacob exercised his famous gifts. Perhaps they had never been so useful. | Continue reading