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Walking Along Brighton Beach
As soon as Ashley came down the stairs from the subway, which rattles across a bridge over Brighton Beach Avenue, it all came tumbling out: who he really was and that he was married. Every time a train passed overhead it drowned out what he was saying and he would have start over. Short, but…
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Giving Up The Giver
What is it like to hand your award-winning young adult novel over to Hollywood, 21 years after it was written? Lois Lowry talks to the New York Times about the forthcoming film adaption of The Giver.
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The Rumpus Interview with Francesca Lia Block
Francesca Lia Block discusses her passion for writing twenty-five years after her iconic debut, Weetzie Bat, her propensity for hypergraphia, and the value of a supportive editor.
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For Sale: John Cheever’s Magical Suburban Home
Alexander Nazaryan’s Newsweek essay about John Cheever’s home (for sale, in Ossining) is more than a real estate ad; it’s a beautiful homage to the suburbanite writer. Upon touring the house with Susan, Cheever’s daughter, Nazaryan writes: I kept asking the one question obviously worth asking—What was it like here?—and she kept wracking her mind and returned…
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Short Stories for Aliens
Do aliens, once in love, ever break up? You’d have to hope so. It would be kind of creepy, all these aliens living monogamously to like age 9,000, making love in that slow, telepathic way they have. And afterward, they do that “brain meld” thing and put their “teeth” back in. Eek. Let’s give him…
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Away, But Not Away
How can writers get a room of their own, literally or figuratively? In Away, an essay in the summer issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Roxana Robinson writes about carving out private space in the midst of being over-saturated by the world around you: You can call it a blessing, I suppose: You’re never bored. You’re always interested…
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Roger Angell Nation
When you read Roger Angell, you can (it’s cheesy, but true!) smell clover and hear the crack of a baseball against a baseball bat. Angell is synonymous with baseball writing, and this week, he’s being inducted into the Hall of Fame. To celebrate, the New Yorker has a post up, featuring a video interview with Angell and…
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Turned Out I Wanted A Snack
In the newest installment of the Believer‘s interview series, What Would Twitter Do?, Sheila Heti interviews the reigning queen of Twitter, Patricia Lockwood. Patricia breaks down Pie Dough Disease: when pie dough (aka, a tweet) has “been to too much college” and refuses to be shaped. And also, loneliness: I don’t experience much loneliness, oddly. Sometimes I…
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Zadie Smith: Pathological Reader
In Oprah, the author writes that her consumption of books may be absurd, but that, at least, summer is a good time to have pathological reading habits. I would like to say in my defense that I don’t really get the appeal of YOLO. I live many times over. Hypothetical, subterranean lives that run beneath the relative…
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140 Keystrokes
It’s hard to go a day without the question, does poetry matter? crop up somewhere, and if you’re in the mood for a longread, David Lehman has written an excellent essay on anxiety about poetry, in an Internet age. Is poetry dead, does it matter, is there too much of it, does anyone anywhere buy…
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90% More Prose
Calling all T.S Eliot nerds (or, just nerds): nearly 90% of Eliot’s prose has been unavailable or out-out-print; this year, Ronald Schuchard is publishing the first out of his eight-volume work, The Complete Prose of T.S Eliot.
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The Poetry of Power Tools
Dan Piepenbring writes at the Paris Review about the universe inside industrial-supply catalogs, which offer a different kind of poetry to readers: And so I often reach for it in pursuit of a kind of materialist awe. It makes for a reading experience more engaging, imaginative, and informative than almost anything that passes as literature. I’ve put down…