Posts by author
Claire Burgess
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The Queen of Steam
“I was like, Either I’m a sexual deviant, which is always a possibility, or they’re wrong,” says Engler of publishers’ reluctance to print raunchy material. She sips from a can of Grapeade. “Turned out they were wrong.” At Vulture, Phoebe…
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Trigger Warning
Neil Gaiman talks with The Daily Beast about his new story collection, Trigger Warning, why he chose the controversial title, and why he’s become obsessed with the conversation around trigger warnings: It seemed to me that so much of it…
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What’s Your Story?
Laura van den Berg talks with Salon about writing her first novel, Find Me, and the connection between memory and storytelling: I think memory and storytelling rise from a similar impulse. Part of the drive behind the shaping and recalling…
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The Real Life of the Writer
We are quite happy to view images of writers’ desks and read features on ‘Where I Write’. Very different would be to see ‘Where I Sleep’ or ‘Where I Park the Car’; ‘Where I store the extra loo roll’. Of…
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Labels Are for Jars
All this classifying, it seems to me, is the very antithesis of literature. The way of literature is to seek universality. Writers try to reach beyond those things that divide us: culture, class, gender, race. Given the chance, we would…
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The Last Frontier of Empathy
Not just eating disorders, but mental health in general, I think, is probably the last frontier of empathy in our culture. I’m not a journalist, I’m not a scientist, and I’m not a health care worker, but I am somebody…
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Well-Rounded
At The Millions, Kelly Link talks about her new story collection Get in Trouble, writing fantastical fiction, and being a teenage mall rat. Perhaps best of all, she gives this excellent piece of writing advice: Of course the strengths of…
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No Offense, But…
Ultimately, a writer needs to shed self-restraint and be at least slightly anti-social to succeed, and hope those they know are understanding. At the New Statesman, Oliver Farry delves into the wide variety of ways to offend people through writing,…
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I Can’t Quit You
Readers stop reading a book they enjoy when they put it down and forget to come back. Readers finish books they hate when they are assigned it for book clubs or else they want to hate-read and laugh about [it]…
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Plotting Plot
With the help of math and computers, a University of Nebraska English professor has been plotting the basic shapes of novels (spoiler: there are six), but this time in a new way. Instead of focusing on plot as action, Matthew…
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Shock and Awe
There’s a misconception about what is truly shocking – that the shocking is the purely explicit. It seems to me that’s easy, and it’s been done in literature for centuries. What’s problematic, the real way to be shocking, is to…