Columns
-
The Words They Carry
The Atlantic has begun curating a series of authors’ favorite passages, poems, and lines. The series is called By Heart and includes an essay on each selection and an illustration by Doug McLean. Many authors discuss their favorite line from their favorite…
-
Happy Birthday, Herman Melville!
At the time of this posting, the 29th Annual Moby-Dick Marathon has about three hours left of its 24-hour reading of Herman Melville’s classic novel. When the reading finishes, attendees will celebrate Melville’s birthday “in old-fashioned style with song and cake.”…
-
Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Dan Weiss is on tour with his band for the next three plus weeks, but fear not: We’ll still be serving up your morning coffee. First, a peek into the world of 21st century princesses and male pinups. These snapshots, on the…
-
The Puzzle Factory
But their eyes, reasonably, come back to me for their startling brilliance, even on drugs, and for their alertness and their knowing.
-
Two-Sentence Horror Stories
Last week, a Reddit user posed a question: “What is the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences?” The question received over 14,000 comments and Buzzfeed compiled twelve of the best. Some are a little unnerving…
-
When Incorrect Grammar Is Just the Right Thing
Vol. 1 Brooklyn has a nifty recurring feature called “Making Progress,” in which they interview writers about their process during projects that are still unfinished. In the latest installment, James Yeh has some really enchanting thoughts about “language that is…
-
Listen to Sylvia Plath Read Her Poems Out Loud
Open Culture’s Josh Jones suggests listening to Sylvia Plath perform her poems out loud as a way to encounter them anew, “without the morbid celebrity baggage Plath’s name carries.” They do seem, in some ways, like completely different poems when…
-
The Last Poem I Loved: “So the Pilot Says Over the Intercom” by David Hernandez
July fifth. My girlfriend and I are waiting on Chinese food to be delivered while the neighborhood kids work their way through buckets of excess firecrackers and I come across a book I thought I’d lost—Always Danger by David Hernandez,…
-
Artifacts
Question: How many years after realizing they weren’t in love did your parents stay together?
-
Writers When They Were Young
Have you seen these photos of famous authors as teenagers? The best are the ones with some text around them—for example, a local newspaper’s write-up of Flannery O’Connor’s youthful books about geese, and a yearbook description of “Peggy” Atwood’s “not-so-secret…
