“We all read from different places, different backgrounds, and my meeting with Proust or Woolf, or Lydia Davis or J. M. Coetzee, will not be yours, nor should it be. On the other hand I do believe reading is an active skill, an art even, certainly not a question of passive absorption. … [so] there must be techniques and tools that everyone can use or try, even if we use them differently.” Tim Parks explains how he reads for The New York Review of Books.
“How I Read”
On Road Trips and Book Hoarding
“Driving hundreds of miles at a time… uncorked the forgotten joys of my undergraduate years—chief among them the fantasy that simply buying a book guarantees that it will get read.” Ted Trautman on going on a book-buying binge during a cross-country road-trip.
●
●
“Poetry is like a pinch, a twist of the skin”
Our own Nick Ripatrazone has been on a roll lately. Apart from the many articles he’s written for The Millions, he’s got a forthcoming collection of short fiction that includes works he published in Esquire and The Kenyon Review. He also published a new poem, “South Africa, 1988,” at The Nervous Breakdown, which you can read in conjunction with his self-interview.
●
●
Edwidge Danticat on Earthquake in Haiti
Video of Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat talking about the earthquake in Haiti at Democracy Now.
●
●