Two writers grapple with climate change in fiction, nonfiction—and real life. Amitav Ghosh, the award-winning author of the Ibis Trilogy returns with his new novel, Gun Island. When a Bengali legend from childhood comes to haunt the lonely life of a rare books dealer...
Writers, like most people, struggle with darkness. It’s icky. When scenes with elements of darkness occur, writers might tend to rush through them, avoiding the worst of the conflict. These moments of resistance to darkness are something I have come to call “swerves,” a...
In his later years, when he had lost nearly everything, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa would descend alone every morning into the roar of Palermo, clutching a small black bag containing a volume of Dickens, a notebook, and a blue biro pen. He would walk...
Grady Klein and Yoram Bauman are the co-authors of The Cartoon Introduction to Calculus. They collaborated previously on the two-volume Cartoon Introduction to Economics, on The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change, and on a pamphlet called The Cartoon Introduction to Digital Ethics.
We are excited to reveal the cover for Emily Nemens' forthcoming book, The Cactus League, out February 4, 2020! It is an explosive, character-driven odyssey through the world of baseball written by the editor of The Paris Review.
Brookdale, California some days, but mostly night TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 8TH, 2016 When you are in a conflict, settle yourself: feet on the floor, eyes closed, deep breath. Imagine that you and the person with whom you disagree will meet in a room. You knock on the door...
Ah Hock is an ordinary man of simple means. Born and raised in a Malaysian fishing village, he favors stability above all, a preference at odds with his rapidly modernizing surroundings. So what brings him to kill a man? This question leads a young,...
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The idea for this collection of one hundred poems is not a new one. My father himself had contemplated such a book, particularly in later years, and had gone as far as discussing it with his editor and close confidants. The notion of a...
Karen Olsson’s stirring and unusual third book, The Weil Conjectures, tells the story of the brilliant Weil siblings—Simone, a philosopher, mystic, and social activist, and André, an influential mathematician—while also recalling the years Olsson spent studying math in college. As she delves into...
A list of sixteen memoirs new and old, spanning a story of growing up in the most hated family in America, a psychedelic journey through the ’60s, and an inside view of Silicon Valley. The perfect additions to your fall reading list.
Assigned to write a profile for The New York Times, Lawrence Weschler began spending time with celebrated neurologist and author Oliver Sacks in the 1980s. After meeting for dinner two or three nights per week for four years, the two developed a close friendship....
I speak and write four languages: Medumba, which is my mother tongue, English, German, and French. I was educated in French and German, and started teaching at a university in Germany, something for which I was prepared at the University in Yaoundé. My first...
When I first read Lian Hearn’s novel, Across the Nightingale Floor (2002), it was a snow day. I sat in my apartment with my feet against the radiator, my heart thudding—not so much over the story, though it was suspenseful, but over the...
Phyllis Grant’s Everything Is Under Control (out April 2020) is a memoir about appetite—how it comes, goes, and refocuses its object of desire. Grant's story spans her days as a dancer struggling to find her place at Juilliard, her time in and out...
"Developing Stories," a series from Work in Progress, invites authors to carry a disposable camera and document whatever compels them—a reading, a walk in the woods, a tour of the writer’s hometown. This week we journey to suburbia with Tupelo Hassman, author of
In Adam Ehrlich Sachs's The Organs of Sense, the year is 1666 and an astronomer makes a prediction shared by no one else in the world: at the stroke...
A cheery deathbed story by way of introduction. My dad said a couple of things to me in the hours before he passed. Three of these were direct orders, which is a total power move: Find a husband. Have a baby. And . ....
Fifteen years ago, Kathryn Scanlan found a stranger’s five-year diary at an estate auction in a small town in Illinois. The owner of the diary was eighty-six years old when she began recording the details of her life in the small book. The diary...
