Write about what captivates. This principle didn’t occur to me until Mysterium was finished, but now I believe in the words wholeheartedly. It was fascination and reverence for the mountains that bore the novel forward. You could say I was taken captive by...
The characters in my novel Early Work think they know everything. In fact, they only know a few things, and most of it is half-remembered (at best) from books or films or articles they’ve seen or read. One of the things they (and...
The history of storytelling has always been one of shouting around a fire, and of the loudest voices retaining control of the larger narrative. This, of course, means certain things in patriarchal society. Stories about cis-gendered men and about whiteness and straightness as an...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
“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...
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...
“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,...
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...