Similar to a birth story for a human or fictional character, AI needs a strong origin story. | Continue reading
Ever since we’ve had language, we’ve played games with words. | Continue reading
Uncertainty, it has been shown, is more painful than certain physical pain. For some reason, the neurologists say, we are wired to fear the unknown. | Continue reading
Sketch by D. Cammell, 1959. The interview took place in New York, at the apartment of Mrs. Louis Henry Cohn, of House of Books, Ltd., who is a friend of Mr. and Mrs. Eliot. The bookcases of the attractive living room contain a remarkable collection of modern authors. On a wa … | Continue reading
Fanny Cradock, the face of the nation’s cooking for decades, was a lodestar in the foul-tasting odyssey of bad British food. | Continue reading
What is lost when Nadine Gordimer's personal library accidentally winds up in boxes on the street? | Continue reading
June 1 More than four inches of rain fell in May—very unusual. This season has felt more like a paid vacation than work. So far.I was taking a nap in the tower this afternoon when a group of maybe three dozen ravens came overhead, calling to each other and circling. Th … | Continue reading
A dreamy word for a color that exists at the edges of the night. | Continue reading
Mark Twain was a prankster, but his belief in telepathy was real enough that he worried about unintentional telepathic plagiarism. | Continue reading
Everett with his crow, Jim, 2002. Percival Everett was born in 1956 and grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. After graduating from the University of Miami, he began a philosophy degree at the University of Oregon, then transferred to a master’s program in fiction … | Continue reading
A dreamy word for a color that exists at the edges of the night. | Continue reading
Fernando Pessoa created more than a hundred alter egos, all of whom he gave complex biographies and distinctive styles of their own. | Continue reading
Chinua Achebe was born in Eastern Nigeria in 1930. He went to the local public schools and was among the first students to graduate from the University of Ibadan. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation as a radio producer and Director of Exter … | Continue reading
For so many of the millions of tourists who come to Orlando, this—Disney, Universal Studios, I-Drive, all of it—stands in for America itself. | Continue reading
The novel of ideas is a serious enterprise. But what if a susceptibility to the gimmick is the one feature that consolidates this genre? | Continue reading
One of the magical things about Arthur Russell’s music is the way it conveys feelings, especially feelings that are not easily verbalized. | Continue reading
‘Lord of the Flies’ has a very odd power. | Continue reading
When Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall set out to write the Martin Beck mysteries, nothing of the kind had ever appeared in Scandinavian literature. | Continue reading
The extraordinary life of a French chef whose technological innovations fed the Irish during the famine. | Continue reading
How preposterous is it that Vita Sackville-West, the bestselling bisexual baroness who wrote over thirty-five books, should be remembered today merely as a smoocher of Virginia Woolf? | Continue reading
The poet called his longtime Lower East Side digs his “N.Y. nest”—and nest it was, with low light, dirty dishes, and papers strewn about. | Continue reading
The phenomenon of the London “Roaring Girl” reached its apotheosis in the form of Mary Frith, a smoking, cursing, thieving, braggart who spoke and—most shocking of all—dressed like a man. | Continue reading
Name: Kornei Chukovsky. Dates: 1882 to 1969. Number of supremo-supremo classic children’s books to his credit: ten or twelve. | 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
William Collins—“Poor Collins” to his contemporaries. 1721–1759: dead, completely incapacitated and insane, at thirty-seven. | Continue reading
Ivan Brunetti on Lynda Barry, and all the things that can happen in the space of four panels. | Continue reading
Photograph of John Fowles by Carolyn Djanogly John Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, on March 31, 1926. He attended Bedford School (1940–1944) and then served nearly two years in the Royal Marines. After his four years at Oxford (New College), where he read … | Continue reading
Jenny Odell on an encounter with Emerson’s ‘Essays .’ | Continue reading
The lives of these horsewomen were filled with ambiguity and dare-devilry, sex and sexism, glamor and skill. | Continue reading
To deem African American Vernacular English “bad” English isn’t just racist—from a linguistic standpoint, it’s also entirely incorrect. | Continue reading
It paid $12.50 an hour with clothes on, $25 with clothes off. The choice, I figured, was obvious. | Continue reading
The following interview incorporates three done with John Gardner over the last decade of his life. After interviewing him in 1971, Frank McConnell wrote of the thirty-nine-year-old author as one of the most original and promising younger American novelists. His first four … | Continue reading
The author at his jazz club, Peter Cat, in 1978. Haruki Murakami is not only arguably the most experimental Japanese novelist to have been translated into English, he is also the most popular, with sales in the millions worldwide. His greatest novels inhabit the liminal zone … | Continue reading
Tennessee Williams, ca. 1965. Photograph by Orlando Fernandez. In Chicago, Williams was hard at work on the production of a new play being done at the Goodman Theater. It was a humorous and moving work called A House Not Meant to Stand, the title of which was his commen … | Continue reading
Iris Origo might be the most self-effacing writer ever to gain renown as a diarist. | Continue reading
I was in that hollow tunnel where no one asks anymore how the book is coming. I could no longer see the origin point. | Continue reading
Illustration by Michael Batterberry, 1956. It was, in a sense, type-casting when a few years ago a film was planned that would have shown us Garbo playing the role of Isak Dinesen in a screen version of Out of Africa, for the writer is, like the actress, a My … | Continue reading
Valerie Stivers cooks up a menu inspired by Shirley Jackson, including dandelion pie, peanut brittle, and deathly sweet blackberries. | Continue reading
The true undergirding of lasting works of art is the embrace of contradictions, and ‘Peanuts’ is no exception. | Continue reading
Svetlana Alexievich’s newly translated ‘Last Witnesses’ weaves together accounts from Soviets whose childhoods were torn apart by World War II. | 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
“That is not all of Arctic Summer—there is almost half as much of it again—but that’s all I want to read because now it goes off, or at least I think so, and I do not want my voice to go out into the air while my heart is sinking. It will be more interesti … | Continue reading
In my cell, unlike in Xavier de Maistre’s room, there are no pictures, no trinkets, no sofas, no armchairs. | Continue reading
To read Eve Babitz is to feel like her passenger, cruising down long Hollywood streets through a painted-backdrop sunset toward eternal waves. | Continue reading
This theory, argued by futurists and tech visionaries, holds that we live all in an intricately detailed game cooked up by a demigod, hacker or AI mastermind. | Continue reading