Features & Reviews
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The (Old) New Leader
In January 2006, The New Leader stopped print publication, an early omen to The Christian Science Monitor. But this eighty-five-year old magazine continues to publish bimonthly in the form of PDF on their website. In its heyday, The New Leader…
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A Call for Writing Advice
Q: How Do You Crank Up to Write? A: “Discipline.” John Updike did it all the time, Richard Ford did it early in the morning, Nathaniel Hawthorne did it nonstop, Philip Roth and Thomas Wolfe while standing, and Jane Kramer…
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The Sky Below
A.J. Liebling once remarked that the authors of newspaper obituaries are “a frustrated and usually anonymous tribe.” That’s certainly true of Gabriel Collins, narrator of Stacey D’Erasmo’s unusual new novel, The Sky Below.
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The Shorty Q&A with Mary Roach
Mary Roach has written best-selling books about dead bodies, ghosts, and fucking. Her work is accessible and unflinching, presenting a variety of quirky or unsavory topics in a manner distinctive and engaging.
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A Call for the Rebirth of Literary Magazines
“. . . This is a critical time not just for Granta but also for the future of the literary journal as an art form. It is no longer enough for a literary magazine to publish ‘good writing,’ or even…
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An Interview with Spoken Word Legend Bucky Sinister
“That was my other big misconception. That if I got sober and went to a meeting they’d make me believe in God. Not true.”
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Do We All Have a Story?
To a certain extent, asking if we all get a passion is like asking if we all have a story to tell.
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Font Factor
Helvetica, a 2007 film, looks at the history of this now-ubiquitous font, from its classical modernist roots in 1957 Switzerland to contemporary American billboards. Originally designed to be neutral, fonts have taken on new weight. New designers follow font trends,…
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Beyond the Pleasure Principle
A review of Vienna Triangle, by Brenda Webster Vienna Triangle is much more than the construction of a fiction around historical facts and figures.
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People Reading
This blog captures People Reading as an on-going testament to the fact that people still read. They read Focault, Michael Crichton, Emily Dickinson; they read in Spanish and in Russian; they read on the BART platform, at the laundromat, and…
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The Axis of Empathy
Much has been written recently about Pakistan, most of it having to do with George W. Bush’s War on Terror. Where exactly is bin Laden hiding? Is the Pakistani government doing enough to help find him? And what of A.Q.…
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An Interview with Lawrence Weschler (about how to interview, among other things)
“I generally don’t use tape recorders. I take notes and work from memory. You can use the tape recorder as an aide-memoire, but I can tell you that I have been doing this for thirty years, and I’ve never had…