Reading Roberto Bolaño’s Final Wake-Up Call
If you’re trying to decide whether or not to read Bolaño’s 900-page opus, I can only say this: it must be read, but no shame to any person who cannot.
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Enemy of the State: A Tribute to Jamal Khashoggi
Writers, intellectuals, and journalists are not destined to be slaves or flatterers.
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“I Could Feel the Poverty”
In a workshop, my fellow writers had said the moment wasn’t believable because “we didn’t have that kind of poverty in the United States.”
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Remembering My Parents’ Bookshelf
Did I enjoy these books? Though they don’t interest me now, I think I did enjoy them then. I was accumulating my 10,000 hours of reading practice.
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A Hidden Corner for the Hardcore: The New Yorker’s Summer Flash Fiction Series
The best part about The New Yorker’s summer flash fiction series is that The New Yorker did a summer flash fiction series. The worst part about The New Yorker’s summer flash fiction series is that if you blinked you missed it.
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An Ode to Reading on Public Transit
In the past six months, I’ve finished 15 novels. My thoughts have since kaleidoscoped; my dreams have evolved; my concentration has slowly but surely fortified over time. I use social media less and less each day.
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Imani Josey Wants to Tell Black Girls’ Stories
I’m not sure how many other black girls are on the cover of YA fantasy book series, and I’m not sure how many lead their own stories as protagonists. But judging by Lee & Low’s annual research, the number is incredibly low.
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Don’t Talk About Your Book Until It’s Published
Am I writing a book now? That’s between me and my hypothetical manuscript. I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut, hunker down, and get to work.
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Alternate Writing Residencies for the Trump Era
I couldn't have been more charmed by this rest stop, a wood stove, a solarium with its plant powered waste-treatment plant. There were desks and a view, as well as unlimited coffee, and, I was told, sometimes they provided Twizzlers.
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An Inside Job: Lessons from Watergate for the Trump Era
Since much of the material being leaked about alleged connections between Trump and Russia involves classified national security matters, Trump can plausibly threaten to prosecute the leakers. And, unlike Nixon, Trump has a stalwart Republican majority in both houses of Congress.
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Bring Back the Book Jacket Photo
Bring back those full-page portraits that pronounced I wrote a book, damn it.
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The Best Snow Story Ever
Gass began writing the story “to entertain a toothache.” That’s an appropriate anecdote. A philosopher by training and a critic by practice, Gass has always been in love with language. Words are his God.
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Why the National Magazine Awards Quietly Dropped Its Fiction Category
Short stories aren’t clickbait. They don’t make much noise or much money. And yet the best of them long outlast the paper on which they were first printed.
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How I Got It: ‘Breakfast of Champions’
That I could have found a book that so enflamed me in such a serene, well-meaning place now seems to me a rude and minor marvel, like a tabernacle choir breaking into “Fuck tha Police.”
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What Is It About Hibbing?
Whether it was the richly funded schools or the iron ore in the water or some other strange vortex (Hibbing is also, weirdly, at the epicenter of climate change), the town boasts an unusual number of writers, some of them culture-changers like Dylan.
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Renegade Political Fiction: ‘The Revolutionaries Try Again’
Economic, political and social violence are senseless, and render us unable to tell neat linear narratives about injustice and protest.
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Exclusive First Look: Claire Cameron’s ‘The Last Neanderthal’
Today we reveal the cover of staffer Claire Cameron's upcoming novel, 'The Last Neanderthal.'
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