On a visit home last year, on a late-night walk, my mother and I were talking books. We were still getting used to the idea that I would be publishing one myself, and something about the combination of this news and a mother’s impulse...

The Pea-Pickers is a classic Australian novel, in the sense that it remains in print seventy years after its release, but also in the sense that it is fascinating and timeless. It was written by Eve Langley in the late 1930s, but it is...

Editor and publisher Robert Giroux worked with some of the most esteemed writers of his day, including Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, and many other giants of twentieth-century literature. In 1964, the company’s name was changed to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He was...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Since Destroy All Monsters was published last fall, readers have reached out with all sorts of questions. Some have wanted to know the best place to start this two-sided novel—Side A or Side B? Others have wondered about the book’s layers, references, and threaded...

Two decades after his death, my father still troubles me. He remains a mystery and a contradiction—the man my mother loved, who sat each night at the head of the table, silently carving the roast. The man my brothers and I barely knew. Dinners were...

As diverse as our stories may be poets are nevertheless in the process of creating a single art, some trace of what we were able to accomplish with our language before we inevitably canceled each other out. Eventually, through lurking, inescapable age, or cataclysm,...

I’m a little in love with the idea that a poem is an occasion for two people to share a trouble, whatever the outcome of that trouble might be. So, I would say that the listener I would want is a person with whom...

Some years ago, a friend wrote to me admiring what he called at the time my “bivalve poems.” I thought he meant how a lot of the poems in my new book consisted of two stanzas of equal length, and that was partly true....

Find an example of wood with your eyes. The floorboards, a door, trim around the window, cutting board, kitchen table, the sycamore there. Imagine it against your knuckles as you rap on it. Feel how hard. Hear the knock. Now, add time. Not that...

As an academic philosopher and the author of many books of poetry, I’m often asked about the relationship between poetry and philosophy. What I’ve usually said in the past is something along these lines: Philosophy and poetry can both be ways of responding to...

For as long as I can remember, I have composed poems from the bits of language revolving in my head when no more pressing thoughts intrude. While out for a walk or running an errand, a phrase or stanza might start up and repeat...

“Leon felt nothing but horny for Nate at this point. That hurt. Everything was hateful apart from how wildly he longed for that fucker.” —Period Sometimes a line in someone else’s book will tell you, more clearly and succinctly than you have ever been able...

As a novelist I am wary of what is often called “research,” by which I mean reading detailed, real-life criminal cases or news stories and using those details, or the structure of those narratives, in a narrative of my own. This is partly due...

My novel, The Made-Up Man, began with an inside joke. In 2005, when I was twenty-two, I backpacked Europe for a month with my buddy Andrew. We toured cities we’d already heard of, but also decided, just for the hell of it,...

When I began researching Bringing Down the Colonel some ten years ago, I was confident that I was writing “history.” I hoped that by telling the story of a lost, late Gilded Age sex scandal, I could shed light on how far women had...