Letters from AWP: Re-Entry Is Hard
In which our correspondent gets home from AWP, exhausted, inspired, and in possession of two new tote bags.
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Letters from AWP: The Writer’s Life in Portland
In which our correspondent make his yearly jet-lagged pilgrimage to the beating heart of America’s literary community.
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Working with What You’ve Got: An Interview with Lydia Kiesling
My children don’t make me miserable—the way American society fails parents of every background is much more immiserating.
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Dispatches from Nicosia: Birds, Cats, and the Cyprus Talks
I am here to research, among other questions, the poet C.P. Cavafy. The entire enterprise bears an imprint of ridiculousness the poet himself might have appreciated.
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Death and the Poet: Inside the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast
Abby was murdered in the morning while Andrew was out of the house, a fact established by forensic examination of the couple’s stomach contents. He came home a few hours later, sat down on the sofa in the sitting room and was killed, never knowing his wife’s body was cooling upstairs on the guest room floor.
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My Pilgrimage to the House of Brontë
To live in Haworth during Charlotte Brontë's time would have made anyone from the 21st century chronically nauseated.
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That Was Us: An Expat’s Search for Home
To be an expat is to always feel slightly on the fringe of things. It is to perpetually be a little lost, to live with the nagging feeling that your life is happening elsewhere. It is to no longer really belong anywhere; to lose the ability to say, with total assuredness, This is my home.
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Ambrose Akinmusire and Jazz in the Smoldering City: A Dispatch From Kyiv
Whatever they may have expected, what the Ambrose Akinmusire Quartet got was a night onstage before this cloud of witnesses. An otherwise unimaginable crowd in a country in the grip of a rumored war stopping to listen to a black man from Oakland and his band testify while the city burns away its edges.
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My Travels with Harper Lee
The countdown to midnight exceeded all expectations. News trucks from Birmingham, Mobile, Pensacola, as well as major outlets like CNN, jockeyed for curb space along West Claiborne Street. Reporters flanked the throng of Lee enthusiasts, requesting interviews.
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The Best Friend There Is: Keeping Time with Brazenhead Books
“I’ve accepted the end times,” he says. “Not, like, in a Biblical way. I just did the math.”
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Meet Me Under the Clock: A New Orleans Story
It’s the small traditions -- from eating red beans and rice on Monday to meeting under a clock outside a department store -- that remind them that some part of this sinking city will endure. Those reminders are sacred, even if they seem trivial to the rest of the world.
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Cuba on the Cusp in ‘Havana Motor Club’
Cubans are getting ready to navigate a treacherous crossroads -- the place where communism and capitalism intersect and collide.
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What the New Whitney Museum Says About the New New York City
The new Whitney is the latest monument to contemporary New York’s get-rich-or-get-out ethos.
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From the Internet to the Ivy League: Fanfiction in the Classroom
Fanfiction will be taught and studied in future classrooms across the country -- the only question is how.
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Viva Las Vegas: On Getting an MFA in Sin City
Haruki Murakami runs marathons, the great Amy Hempel volunteers at animal shelters, and Flannery O'Connor had her Catholic faith. Me, I toss plastic chips onto green felt.
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Tend to the Wounded: Dispatches from Kyiv
This is the first time I’ve been in a hot war zone, and the only thing I’ve learned is that I’m too old for this shit.
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Murder Goes to Prep School: A Conversation About Tana French’s The Secret Place
The girls in The Secret Place are very recognizably obnoxious teenagers — to the extent that I thought they were all idiots, and at one point or another I thought all of them capable of murder.
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