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  • Cabin in the Woods

    It may not be 1869 anymore, but fear not: the golden age of conservation literature is far from over. As part of the Pacific Standard‘s week-long series on “opting-out,” Eva Holland writes about the tradition of environmental writing, from Thoreau to David Gessner. Also in the series: a patriarchal cult in Alaska, homesteading, and the “new domesticity.”

  • What Would Lynne Tillman Do?

    It is nearly impossible to live in New York City without feeling a flicker of Lynne Tillman’s exacting presence. Over at the New Yorker, the indomitable Colm Toibin writes about the (equally) indomitable Lynne Tillman in the introduction to What Would Lynne Tillman Do?: Essays.  Lynne Tillman’s essays, and indeed the interviews she has given and…

  • Go Tell It on the iPhone

    Praise the writer’s notebook, and praise the evolution of the writer’s notebook. Over at the New Yorker, Casey Cep writes about archiving the daily details digitally in photographs, rather than on paper: Photography engenders a new kind of ekphrasis, especially when the writer herself is the photographer. That is why I have found myself so willing to…

  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith Crack Each Other Up

    Two weeks ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith sat down at the Schomburg Center to chat about Adichie’s glorious novel, Americanah (and literature, race, gender, and love!). Their conversation was smart and incisive, with a lot of laughing—but if you missed it, you can watch the talk here.

  • “Yes. Of course. But yet. Anyway.”

    Harper’s Magazine interviews Leslie Jamison about her debut, home-run collection of essays, The Empathy Exams: Essays. On the complications (and yet! necessity) of empathy, Jamison writes: So there’s a lot of danger attached to empathy: it might be self-serving or self-absorbed; it might lead our moral reasoning astray, or supplant moral reasoning entirely. (See this fantastic piece by Paul Bloom…

  • The Treasures in Union Square

    If you are among those who fantasize about secret messages in the public world—love letters in Burger King wrappers and Narnia entrances in gym lockers—then geocaching, or at least an essay about geocaching, might be just for you. Matthew Fishbane writes in The Boston Review on the ways that geogaching makes him see things he otherwise might…

  • Dispatches from the Rust Belt

    Morning Edition interviews writer and journalist David Giffels about his new book, The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt. Giffels writes about his choice to remain in Akron, Ohio when everyone around him seemed to be leaving, including LeBron James. From the NPR interview: LeBron James and I are, I think, the…

  • Penelope and Phyllis

    Two mid-century writers you don’t hear a lot about are getting some attention: Penelope Mortimer at The Daily Beast, and Phyllis McGinley at The Paris Review. Though they shared publication histories (and initials), their styles couldn’t have been more different. Penelope tended to write dark, confessional stories about the difficulties of marriage and love, while Phyllis wrote about “the stability…

  • Picturing Appalachia

    There’s a bite-sized symposium about the challenges of photographing Appalachia happening over at the Oxford American right now, and it’s a great read. In his essay, “Looking Without Fear,” Roger May writes: Recently, I was thinking about my grandfather and missing him a great deal. I decided to flip through his bible where, throughout the…

  • I remember, I remember

    A good thing to do on a Monday is to go and read, or re-read, Mary Ruefle’s beautiful essay I remember at the poetry foundation —  a beautiful meditation on childhood, cows and her first electric typewriter (and also, just about everything else). I remember, two years later, reading Three Poems on a grassy slope while across the…

  • Suprisingly Whimsical

    A couple weeks old, but always fresh: the poet Charles Simic writes on the NYR’s blog about the language that sticks, both on and off the page. Simic has a lot of dark poems but the occasional blogs he writes for the New York Review of Books tend to be surprisingly whimsical. “His wife looks…

  • Thoreau, Angsty Teen

    In his new biography, The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, Michael Sims describes the young philosopher as a “quirky” young man who was a little lost when it came to deciding on his career and future (much like half the people you went to college with). He also liked popcorn: Sims says one of his aims was to…