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  • 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.…

  • We All Contain Multitudes of Tacky

    Ever droll, Sadie Stein writes in the Paris Review about the reaction we’re (all) prone to have when people recommend literature based on our professed likes and dislikes: When someone says I will like something, I tend to assume the something in question will be precious, tedious, and often aggressively eccentric. Sometimes I do like these things, which is…

  • Licking Vladimir’s Stamps

    It may seem a little outdated to invoke Vera Nabokov’s name, but most writers seem to agree on the need for a “Vera”—a partner or friend, willing to edit and support. In the Atlantic this week, Koa Beck explores the legend of the do-it-all spouse.

  • The Great G.A.N.

    Does the “Great American Novel” actually exist—or is it just the name of a book by Philip Roth? Over at the New Yorker, you can read Adam Gopnik’s review of The Dream of the Great American Novel by Laurence Buell, and you can also listen to Elizabeth Gilbert, Adam Gopnik and Sasha Weiss discuss what the term has evolved…

  • Devout Apostrophes

    This week, the Paris Review has a really beautiful interview up with the poet Mary Szybist. She talks about religion, Wallace Stevens and her abiding love for the apostrophe:  I have always been attracted to apostrophe, perhaps because of its resemblance to prayer. A voice reaches out to something beyond itself that cannot answer it. I find that moving in part because…

  • The Microphone on the Radio Tower

    Marina Keegan died in a car accident just five days after she graduated from Yale University. But her writing lives on, and lends an empathetic voice to the often tedious discussions of millennials. From her posthumous essay, “Song for the special,” in Salon: Every generation thinks it’s special — my grandparents because they remember World War…

  • The Personal Becomes Public

    Karl Ove Knausgaard’s magnum-opus, My Struggle, is an unflinching and exhaustive chronicle of a modern life. Interviews with the Norwegian writer are equally as vulnerable and exacting: It is too late to shield himself. For all the success of My Struggle, Knausgaard speaks of its impact with more regret than pride. Sitting in his rustic studio across the yard…