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  • An Army of Readers

    The more tools that we get for communication and collaboration, the more we’re taking reading and writing — these really solitary pursuits — and building communities around them for connection and conversation. Rachel Fershleiser gives a smashing TED Talk about John Green, non-profit budgets, and how the Internet has given shape to a community of…

  • Last Rain

    Every holiday has its parallel griefs, as much for what isn’t present as for what is. In the New Yorker, Ruth Margalit writes beautifully about experiencing Mother’s Day, after her mother is gone: Meghan O’Rourke has a wonderful word for the club of those without mothers. She calls us not motherless but unmothered. It feels right—an ontological…

  • “I knew from the beginning I wanted to tell the story”

    It’s been a big week—no, month—no, year—for Rumpus Essays Editor Roxanne Gay, who has two books coming out this summer, both of which have already been widely praised. Yesterday, Gay talked with Rumpus contributor Sari Botton at a Vol. 1 Brooklyn event at Community Bookstore. English Kills Review details the conversation.

  • One Hundred Years of Dublin

    Gather round, ye James Joyce devotees: Mark O’Connell has an essay (replete with some pretty nifty info-graphics) up at Salon on the Dublin of the past and present: Everyone in Dubliners is thinking about a way out, if not actively pursuing one; everyone is dreaming of some better version of himself in some better place. The stories are filled with vague conjurings of…

  • Boa Constrictor in the Derby Hat

    The Little Prince is one of those books which just as easily affects adults as children, and it’s hard to go long without encountering it. Still, the story remains a bit of a mystery. In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik tries to solve bits of it: For all of the Prince’s journey is a journey of exile,…

  • Race, Power, Publishing

    The disproportionally white publishing industry matters because agents and editors stand between writers and readers. Anika Noni Rose put it perfectly in Vanity Fair this month: “There are so many writers of color out there, and often what they get when they bring their books to their editors, they say, ‘We don’t relate to the character.’ Well it’s…

  • Hair-Combing with Gabriel Garcia Marquez

    The Gabriel García Márquez accolades continue to roll in—over at The Paris Review, the complete text of Silvana Paternostro’s oral biography of Márquez is available. It’s full of enlightening tidbits from the author’s friends and family, like: GUILLERMO ANGULO: His greatest inspiration was his grandmother. One of his relatives was combing his hair, and his grandmother warned him not to comb his hair…

  • The Emancipation of Digital Reading?

    Is it possible to read War and Peace on an iPhone? In the Pacific Standard, Casey Cepp considers whether apps can actually help us become better, more thoughtful readers: This literary diet will not be for everyone. But the emancipation of digital reading habits, like those of the printed book before them, allows us to choose the way we read.

  • You Are Invisible

    Writing in the New Yorker about the smartphone app Cloak, Mark O’Connell offers a thoroughly beautiful and poetic commentary on the ontology of visibility: By generating a kind of omnipresence—whereby we are always available, visible, contactable, all of us there all the time—the technologies that mediate our lives also cause us to disappear, to vanish into a fixed position on…

  • For Such Magnificence

    There have been, and will continue to be, a lot of eulogies for Gabriel García Márquez this week. In the Sunday Times, Salman Rushdie has an especially nice meditation on magical realism: But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn’t matter. It would be mere whimsy — writing in which, because anything can happen, nothing has effect. It’s…

  • A (Bookstore) Affair to Remember

    Springtime makes us think about past relationships, and maybe there are none more romantic than the ones we’ve shared with the bookstores we’ve worked at. Janet Potter writes in The Millions about her own history with bookstores: My life became inseparable from the bookstore. When my shift was over I would stay for upwards of an hour just talking…

  • It Ends With Eating a Strawberry

    It might be snowing outside, but April is still National Poetry Month, and Tin House has a wonderful interview up with poet Ellen Bass. Read about her writing routine, the Miss America Pageant, expectations, and what it was like to study with Anne Sexton, here. Poetry is such a good medium for coming to terms with expectations and disappointments.…