My FOMO is particularly acute in the summer. When I go on vacation, I always take too many books with me. The haphazard reading of my childhood summers is gone, and sometimes I think I’m chasing it, when I pack too many books.

The way we talk about Annie Dillard makes me sad and afraid. Sad because we're unable to appreciate her work if we can't see how she is just one of us. And afraid because affixing someone with otherness is the first stage in allowing that someone to be forgotten.

Poe tells us that being a genius means attracting haters, “a set of homunculi, eager to grow notorious by the pertinacity of their yelpings,” but also that, crucially, not everyone who attracts haters is a genius.

Now we're all possessors of personal supercomputers that can instantly connect us to whole libraries — there can seem little sense to make iambs and trochees part of one's soul.

Was the craft of fiction around desire and obstacle taught by men and for men, for men protagonists and men readers? Was fiction part of the patriarchy? Was the craft of fiction part of the patriarchy? The answers were all yes.

In reading, as in traveling, I want to be transported—not physically, but into a deeper engagement with the world and the people around me. Absent of the kind of traveling I’d like to do, reading has been its own kind of portal.

Morrison does not leap from one kind of story to something radically different. Her voice shines through from the beginning. Her books all bear the marks of her imagination, style, and insight.

On the eve of its 1,600th birthday, Venice was once again experiencing a pandemic. Venice, the city that gave us the word quarantena, quarantine, for the 40 days sailors were required to spend in isolation to avoid spreading the plague.

My editor, with her thorough diligence and incredible acuity, compiled the extensive editorial feedback: 5,500-plus comments via track changes and 13 pages of global comments.

Sojourn into a world so foreign was the birthright of the first humans, and it still is today, if you choose it.

Maybe the point is that we writers should appreciate writing for the very way it keeps us trying, keeps us dreaming.

I knew Elizabeth mostly as a poet. I would have liked to have known her better. She left behind images and metaphors, the music of her lines and stanzas. And more than that.