Essays – Work in Progress

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06.14.18

Using the Red Horse Pictographs to Explore the Past

Essays

Using the Red Horse Pictographs to Explore the Past

As anyone who writes historical fiction knows, research becomes your partner. If you do too much, it becomes your master, weighing down the narrative; too little, the reader fails to be transported to the world of the book. The primary challenge I give myself...

Tatjana Soli

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05.25.18

Turning a Seagull Into a Woman on a Bike

Essays

Turning a Seagull Into a Woman on a Bike

What I’m going to tell you has a very simple plot line. It’s like this: someone decides to write a letter. Someone writes the letter. Someone does not send the letter. Someone writes a novel instead, where someone writes a letter they do not...

Gunnhild Øyehaug On Changing Genre

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05.18.18

The Royal Family and the Arts

Essays

The Royal Family and the Arts

When Prince Harry walks down the aisle with the actor Meghan Markle on May 19th, he will become the first royal in two generations to marry someone from the world of the arts. The relationship between royalty and the arts has been uneasy, even perilous....

Craig Brown

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05.18.18

#CripLit

Essays

#CripLit

I was diagnosed with MS in 1993; I’ve never hidden its physical effects. I publicly used a cane, then double crutches, and now a wheelchair and my official bios, including on the flap copy of my 2013 novel, Hild, are clear about the fact...

Nicola Griffith The Story of a Twitter Chat and Writing Community

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05.04.18

Metamorphica

Essays

Metamorphica

Zachary Mason’s new novel Metamorphica reimagines Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in the tradition of Mason’s bestselling debut novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey. His new novel transforms Ovid’s epic poem that is itself about endless transformation, reimagining the stories and stringing them together...

Zachary Mason

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04.27.18

The Poet Who Taught the Serious Girl to Cut the Sun

Essays

The Poet Who Taught the Serious Girl to Cut the Sun

I am thirteen. My mom and I are walking down a hallway in the wing of a San Francisco art museum and pass an auditorium. I can hear a voice on the other side of the door, loud, accented, lilting and rolling and sure...

Tessa Fontaine On Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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04.27.18

Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads In Them

Essays

Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads In Them

We had filled our backpacks with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We also threw in thermoses of chocolate milk we’d mixed ourselves. We thought the milk would stay cold. At the bottom of our backpacks shook boxes of pellets for our pump-styled air...

Jon Pineda

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04.27.18

Memory Palaces

Essays

Memory Palaces

The first poem I remember—really, it is the first poem I remember remembering—began: In a dark park a tree barked And a crocus croaked I watched my watch… At least, I think that was it, but I lost the book years ago, and I don’t know who wrote...

Daniel Swift On Nursery Rhymes

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04.20.18

Living Toward That Voice

Essays

Living Toward That Voice

I am still amazed to recall that everyone I spoke with while researching James Wright: A Life in Poetry could remember the poet so vividly. His physical presence in the room, his astonishing capacity for reciting poetry and prose from memory, and the...

James Wright’s Last Reading in New York City, 1978 Jonathan Blunk

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04.06.18

The Tale of Tonya

Essays

The Tale of Tonya

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks When Tonya Harding is twenty years old she’ll become the first female figure skater to land a triple axel in competition, a jump that requires impossible strength to launch the body into the air from a forward position...

with “Fairy-tale Logic” by A. E. Stallings Kate Lebo

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03.16.18

Not to Free the Hornet

Essays

Not to Free the Hornet

Jon Pineda's Let's No One Get Hurt is an "achingly beautiful" coming-of-age story following a teenage girl scavenging and squatting on the fringe of the American South (Lauren Groff). Pineda's richly textured depiction of place was inspired in part by his own childhood—here,...

Jon Pineda

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03.08.18

My Real Rebecca

Essays

My Real Rebecca

I can’t remember how many times I have read Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, but I know I never tire of its brilliance. It is a book you can read throughout your life, in every stage, because it is one of the most intricately...

On Daphne du Maurier's Groundbreaking Feminism Araminta Hall

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01.26.18

Making Sense of The Last Jedi

Essays

Making Sense of The Last Jedi

Still have some unresolved thoughts after seeing Star Wars: The Last Jedi? A. D. Jameson, a lifelong geek, is here to help. Jameson’s book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture (publishing this May), is...

A. D. Jameson

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12.07.17

Now I Am Going to Write a Book

Essays

Now I Am Going to Write a Book

“Now I am going to write a book. It will be about eating and about what to eat and about people who eat.” That’s M. F. K. Fisher, near the beginning of Serve It Forth, and when I read it, I felt an electric...

On M. F. K. Fisher Robin Sloan

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11.29.17

Centering the Voices of Incarcerated People

Essays

Centering the Voices of Incarcerated People

We send our congratulations to James Forman, Jr, whose Locking Up Our Own was just named one of The New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2017. Not long ago, Forman visited San Quentin Prison to discuss the necessity of including incarcerated...

Emile DeWeaver

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11.16.17

Reading the Margins

Essays

Reading the Margins

“Mom would not say that she had ‘c’ because she feared it would have power over her,” writes an anonymous annotator in my borrowed copy of Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. The book is from the University of Alabama’s library; it’s ragged, musty,...

On Illness as Metaphor Tessa Fontaine

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09.28.17

A Tale of Two Editions

Essays

A Tale of Two Editions

At a glance, the two editions of Elie Wiesel’s Night are strikingly similar in appearance. Both are slim. Both are wrapped in black and white jackets with horizontal rules and emblazoned with the book’s title in type that mysteriously evokes a swastika. Yet the...

On Publication of the Commemorative Night Ileene Smith

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08.23.17

Programming for the Millions

Essays

Programming for the Millions

I dare to imagine the general public learning to write code. I do not mean that knowledge of programming should join the ranks of subjects that represent basic literacy: languages, history, philosophy, the fundamentals of science and mathematics. I mean it the other way...

Ellen Ullman Life in Code

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08.17.17

Jonathan Franzen’s Infinite Sadness

Essays

Jonathan Franzen’s Infinite Sadness

English needs a word for the loneliness you feel when no one else hears what sounds to you like the loudest noise in the room. It happens when your personal receiver is set to a frequency no one else seems to be aware of;...

An Elegy for David Foster Wallace Heather Cass White

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07.21.17

Re-vision

Essays

Re-vision

We donated my dad’s eyes. They were very pretty. What eyes aren’t? Somewhere, I suppose, they still are very pretty. The Eye Donation Bank sent a note thanking us for our gift, the eyes, creating an idea of a gruesome jewelry box. The Bank...

Samantha Hunt

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Using the Red Horse Pictographs to Explore the Past

Turning a Seagull Into a Woman on a Bike

The Royal Family and the Arts

#CripLit

Metamorphica

The Poet Who Taught the Serious Girl to Cut the Sun

Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads In Them

Memory Palaces

Living Toward That Voice

The Tale of Tonya

Not to Free the Hornet

My Real Rebecca

Making Sense of The Last Jedi

Now I Am Going to Write a Book

Centering the Voices of Incarcerated People

Reading the Margins

A Tale of Two Editions

Programming for the Millions

Jonathan Franzen’s Infinite Sadness

Re-vision