Photo by fotografierende on Pexels.com
NY Times: How We Survive Winter
Read this essay last night and enjoyed it. With all of the talk that this will be "our darkest winter," it's refreshing to remember that light returns and in our…
NY Times: Airbnb Horror Story
Early in the evening of July 4, Micaela Giles’s mobile phone started sounding alerts, and a series of messages straight out of a horror movie began scrolling down her screen. Her 19-year-old son told her that his Airbnb host in Madrid had locked him in the fourth-floor apartment where he was supposed to be staying and removed the key. The host was still there, he said, rattling knives around in the kitchen drawer and pressing him to submit to a sexual act. He begged his mother for help.
New York Investment Banker Vows to Unlock Mysteries of Midwestern Brain
New York—The Midwesterner: they grow our food and raise our children, but what do we really know of these simple folk from the hinterlands of the United States?
What Writers Can Learn From ‘Goodnight Moon’
“Goodnight Moon” does two things right away: It sets up a world and then it subverts its own rules even as it follows them. It works like a sonata of sorts, but, like a good version of the form, it does not follow a wholly predictable structure.
“The key lies within the Midwestern brain and the nodules, which rise on the surface of the skull,” said Walsh, an investment banker turned amateur phrenologist. Photo: http://goo.gl/5bmfND
New York Investment Banker Vows to Unlock Mysteries of Midwestern Brain
New York—The Midwesterner: they grow our food and raise our children, but what do we really know of these simple folk from the hinterlands of the United States?
A Master’s in Chick Lit
I’m a genre writer. Gary Shteyngart hasn’t blurbed any of my novels, and Marion Ettlinger has never photographed me for a book jacket. I’m more at ease with the sequins and shirtless men at the Romantic Times conference than I am with the serious eyewear at poetry readings.
Is It O.K. to Mine Real Relationships for Literary Material?
When Robert Lowell used his ex-wife’s letters for his poetry, Elizabeth Bishop told him, “Art just isn’t worth that much.” This week, Francine Prose and Leslie Jamison discuss what they make of mining actual relationships for literary material.
The End, or Something
Endings have always been my Everest. Or, really, if writing a novel is like climbing Everest, then my tendency is to get within eyeshot of the summit and say, “Well, that’s far enough.”
Magic In Service of Truth
Gabo lives. The extraordinary worldwide attention paid to the death of Gabriel García Márquez, and the genuine sorrow felt by readers everywhere at his passing, tells us that the books are still very much alive.