When I was told that Isamu Noguchi wanted me to write his biography, I guessed it must be because he liked the section of my biography of Frida Kahlo that described his love affair with her. In an interview he told me that he...

Charles Wright. The poet between now and not-now; between know and not-know; between the sun’s fire and a mountain’s snow; the poet between Dante and dude. He says he wished for anonymity—not for his poems but for Charles Wright: an anonymous author of astonishing poems—yet...

Pablo Neruda found me in a strange way. I was still a teenager, obsessed with the Beats and pouring over Whitman in English class. I enjoyed writing poetry, but did not yet take it seriously. I was standing in the poetry section of the...

Living inside a book for many years it is perhaps inevitable that one loses sight of what the book is actually about. That is, if one ever really knew in the first place. Writers move stealthily, and almost always by instinct. However on completing...

In late April, Cynthia Haven posted a review of Ellendea Proffer Teasley’s new memoir Brodsky Among Us on her Stanford University Book Haven Blog. One person, however, took exception to her criticism of Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky’s translation of his own works...

“A novel?” a friend emailed after reading an early review of what I’d thought was my collection of linked stories. A week later, a second review also called the book a novel. I wondered, Is my book a novel?

From '70s pop-soaked afternoons to naked flights on the trapeze, Stephen Jarvis shares the singularly unusual genesis of his vast, richly imagined, Dickensian debut, Death and Mr. Pickwick. Enter here for your chance to win a copy!

In author Q&As, someone in the audience invariably asks, “What is your writing routine?” or “What is your process?” I find this question alarming. But even more alarming than the question are all the answers: I wake up at...

A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday,...

I begin with a character. As you know, there are many kinds of characters—Henry James’s peripheral but all the same essential character who observes the narrative with the same mystification and curiosity as does the reader; Joan Didion’s ironical and vaguely menacing character, sometimes...

In 1995 Witold Rybczynski published his first article in The New Yorker. Afterwards Tina Brown, the magazine’s editor, invited him to join her for lunch at her famous table at the Royalton where she asked him what he would like to write about next....

When a writer goes from writing nonfiction to writing fiction, it’s called a leap. When she goes from writing fiction to writing nonfiction, it’s not called anything. A diversion, perhaps, or an excursion, maybe an extra paycheck....

Ceridwen Dovey's most recent collection of stories, Only the Animals, was published this September. Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Megan Mayhew Bergman said the collection "unflinchingly illuminates human nature, and makes clear that the rest of the natural world...

In 1947, concerned about supporting his family, Kurt Vonnegut took a job his brother recommended him for in the PR department at General Electric. The GE News Bureau was organized like a real newspaper—except that its purpose was to produce stories about all the...

Karen Olsson on where fiction touches the real, where our empathy most easily attaches, and how the true-life scandal of the Iran-Contra affair revealed itself to be the perfect backdrop for her sophomore novel, All the Houses, which NPR has called "funny,...

The village of Saltleigh, the setting of my new novel The Crooked House, is a place that has inhabited the shadows of my imagination for a very long time—in much the same way as it has haunted the dreams of my protagonist, Esme...

Every fake should tell a story. Maybe it’s the blue chalk marks on the back of the frame, partially removed by hand, that suggest previous auction sales. Or maybe it’s the insect frass on the picture itself, evoking decades of neglect in an attic,...

I think of poetry as what Wallace Stevens called a soliloquy of the interior paramour, or less grandly, as a form of talking to yourself, rather than addressing an audience. But I have the sense that when people first hear this description of poetry,...

There are many ways to write about Africa, but talent remains the compass. While the continent’s history cannot be easily summarized, its predicament is still one of domination, a taxing predicament that calls for sagacity as well as imagination. Writing under domination is not...

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody,” Rilke wrote in his response to a request for advice and feedback from the nineteen-year-old aspiring poet Franz Kappus. “I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps.” Rilke’s...