Sea of Tranquility was a refuge as much as anything else. It was written against a backdrop of ambulance sirens, while wondering if I was going to see my family again.

Even as a teenager, I was thinking, wow, the life this guy lived. The things he lived through and witnessed, and the way his day-to-day life changed must have been a whiplash experience.

It would almost feel sacrilegious to lineate McLuhan, to clean his meandering messes. Don’t we want our prophets to be weird and uncanny?

More and more, I take sentence level suggestions without hesitation: on one draft of Appleseed, I hit "Accept All" without even reviewing the changes.

Digital minimalism isn't about scrubbing yourself off the Internet. It’s about noticing your Internet stressors, then actively creating and maintaining boundaries around your screen time.

If you’re a poet, you will experience an intense personal engagement or sense of vocation, but from the perspective of poetry out in the world, you’re just a medium for generating more poetry out in the world.

The index is something that we use every day: the Internet, Google. This is why this book is relevant—because this is the age of search; Google is an index.

I don't know when a campus novel was not a social novel. I think the idea of all campus novels are that colleges are kind of test tubes for life, constructed realities in which people who are transitioning from being children to adulthood are put in a small society.

I want to take a machete and go after the dominant culture, but I also see the little joys in it. The little joys in living.

Natasha Brown discusses what brought her to writing, her book Assembly’s path to publication, and her fascination with writing about moments of social flux.

Liberation, to me, would be fully appreciating the present moment—and it resulting in a greater sense of contentment, ease, and freedom.

Growing up in an immigrant family, I was taught the value of hard work and pulling myself up by my bootstraps. But what happens when hard work isn’t enough?

Joyce was a prophet in a way, and one day we may finally be able to fully grasp what he has to say. But for now we have Arroyo to hold our hand as we peruse our illustrated version of this impossible masterpiece.

When I read by myself, I take a lot of shortcuts. I don't think through things. By reading with people, by expressing observations, by watching people react, I've been thinking through a lot of topics about War and Peace more thoroughly.

Randon Billings Noble discusses her path to essay writing, current reading life, the anthology editing process, and what's next in her career.

They're not always glamorous words, they're not always the most superficially eloquent words. But these words have within them some density of feeling, and of desire, and of failure, that therefore become what we want to call poetic.