While some people formed intense relationships with sourdough starters during the pandemic, I got over my Spotify antipathy and started making playlists. Turns out the art of choosing, rejecting, and arranging songs around a theme is just absorbing as it was when I was...
“You never asked questions about me,” I said to Nicole at the end of a brief relationship in which we only ever talked about her. “I didn’t have to,” she said, pointing to two of my poetry books on a nearby shelf. “I’ve read...
Roberto Calasso died this year in July at the age of 80. His latest publication, The Book of All Books, was the tenth book in a series, a narration that moves through the Bible as if through a forest, where every branch—every verse—may...
There’s a moment in my upcoming debut novel, Last Resort, when the protagonist, Caleb—SPOILER ALERT—puts clothes in a washer-dryer. “I [...] put my clothes in her washer-dryer.” Perhaps one of the least noteworthy sentences in my book—in any book?—it is now imprinted on my skull possibly...
Can a person act freely in a system that is completely rigged, in which every action is determined from the outset? Maybe you are haunted by this question as you slog off to Town Hall to vote. Maybe it is so bothersome that you...
Back in 1967, the MP and philosopher Bryan Magee ventured a prediction in the Listener magazine. "Does anyone seriously believe" he asked, "that Beatles music will be an unthinkingly accepted part of daily life all over the world in the 2000s?" My old Latin teacher...
There is no other writer like Jamaica Kincaid. No one who makes the same incantatory sentences, making me feel both awe and terror. No one who is as intensely personal and hallucinatory. No one as interested in pursuing truth, even when it reveals not...
A story collection takes shape over years, usually (or at least in my case, and that of most other writers I’ve known) without an overarching plan in place. The stories accumulate, creating patterns and echoes, until there is a group that one hopes will...
In January, thousands of customers flocked to a department store in Tianjin, China, stocking up on clothes and gifts for Chinese New Year. But as the month wore on, the store’s employees began to fall ill; over the course of just a few days,...
The only work James Harvey completed in the last year of his life (he died, this past May, at the age of 90) was a six page introduction to his late friend Gilberto Perez’ book The Eloquent Screen. And the writing of that short...
Laura van den Berg is known as “a prose master” (Entertainment Weekly) and Sigrid Nunez has referred to her as “one of our most imaginative storytellers." In this "Story Behind the Story", she brings us behind the scenes in writing "Hill of Hell,"...
The coincidence of Coronavirus and National Poetry Month is perhaps fitting: for poetry as a form feels oddly suited to the demands of the moment. We speak of things going viral; a small poem is meme-sized, and stanzas may as well have been designed...
Some places draw language to the surface. The surroundings (that lovely word) provoke a response, sometimes through the sheer subtlety of the landscape’s character. As I wrote ten years ago in “The Rough Bounds,” “I like the sort of track that passes / out...
I was preparing to teach my MFA workshop a couple of months ago when I realized that, in my comments to each of the three students who’d turned in their manuscripts, I’d recommended the same book. I hadn’t read The Whiteness of Bones in...
In his recent New York Times op-ed, Martin Scorsese argues that in order for a movie to be more than mere entertainment—for it to be cinema—it requires “the unifying vision of an individual artist.” Most contemporary movies lack this element, Scorsese says, because...
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...