Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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Scurvy: The Stuff of Nightmares
If you needed something to remind you not to join any expeditions to the Arctic, this Lapham’s Quarterly piece about scurvy in sailors of centuries past should do the trick: (Trapped in the Arctic in 1832, explorer John Ross began to…
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Lies and the Lying Artists Who Tell Them
Art journalist Jen Graves was dismayed to discover she had been lied to by someone claiming to be an outsider artist who in fact had a fairly well-established career. But when she began to look more closely at lies other…
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“Please Let It Go Okay”
Teaching is a complicated profession, especially in the field of creative writing where emotions run high. Does teaching hurt your writing? What if you’re an able writer but a mediocre teacher? Joyce Hinnefeld tackles her ambivalence about the job she’s…
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Authors’ Pet Words and What They Reveal
How much do an author’s most-used words reveal about his or her thought process? Quite a lot, according to this New Yorker essay on pet words both common and uncommon, both consciously selected and inadvertent. One of many deeply interesting examples:…
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The Stories Behind First Sentences
Granta is three posts into a new series in which authors unpack opening sentences they have written. Héctor Abad’s opening sentence is “The first thing I felt when I returned from the jungle was a paralysis of willpower.” His explanation is…
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Blow Your Mind with These Timelines
Using a series of timelines that represent increasingly large amounts of time, this blog post puts everything in perspective. Everything. It starts out simple—timelines of the last 24 hours, the last week, and so on—and works its way up through recorded…
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Dear Sugar Meets Half-Sister
“She’s not a hiker but … that hiking boot on the cover caught her eye. And she was just halfway into chapter one when she said she sat bolt upright in bed and realized that we had the same father.”…
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September 11th from Spain
In fall of 2001, Molly Beer was in Spain, studying to become an ESL teacher and trying her hardest to win over the non-Americans who populated her program. Then September 11 happened, and everything changed. In an essay for Vela called “That…
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Remembering David Foster Wallace
Five years ago today, groundbreaking writer David Foster Wallace took his own life. Maria Popova at Brain Pickings remembers him with a post excerpting Conversations with David Foster Wallace, a “collection of 22 interviews and profiles of the beloved author.” A…
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Book Club Love
In a post titled “The New Golden Age of Online Book Clubs,” Flavorwire shouts out the Rumpus Book Club as one of many sites using new technology to recreate the age-old pleasure of talking about books. (For an example of…
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Rest in Peace, Patriarchy
Yesterday, Slate announced the death of the patriarchy at the age of several thousand years. The Cut’s Kat Stoeffel has honored the dearly departed, which will be mourned by civilizations across the globe, by compiling a list of “39 Things We’ll Miss About…
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“Kholden Kolfeeld’s” Russian Fans
Amid the flood of J. D. Salinger articles related to the upcoming biography and documentary about him, this New Yorker essay by Reed Johnson stands out. It has nothing to do with the biography, actually. It’s about Russian translations of The Catcher in…