alcohol
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500 Years of Drunk
How many different words are there for “intoxicated”? Quite a lot, as it turns out—writers have been inventing new words to describe inebriation for just about as long as they’ve been drinking. A new book exploring the history of synonyms…
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Baijiu on the Rocks
Baijiu is a distilled firewater somewhat like vodka crossed with a non-apple Calvados, with a distinctive nose. Have you tried baijiu, the world’s most consumed liquor? Chances are high that you have not even heard of it. Let novelist and…
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Ladies Drink Free
Whether glamorized or pitied, the figure of the alcoholic writer has long been a subject of cultural fascination. Having written a book on the usual suspects—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, et al.—Olivia Laing asks the unfortunately necessary follow-up question: okay, but what about the…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
In “Hunting For The Little Prince,” Sigal Samuel invites us to tag along as she pursues the real-life inspiration for the blonde-haired protagonist of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s famous children’s book. No spoilers, but this particular missing person search ends happily.…
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No One Hears the Wars in Your Head. Except You.
I worked the same way with alcohol and drugs, and my whiskey elves, my beasts, never disappointed. I mean, they didn’t always write the prettiest prose — cocaine isn’t known to instill poetry — but they usually unearthed interesting images…
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Addiction, Alcohol, and Authors
You didn’t ask directly about gender, but I’ll answer anyway: I stuck with men for a more personal reason, which is that my experience as a child was with a female alcoholic and the subject was just too painful for…
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Instead of Crossing
I believe it started with a slug and three hundred pellets leaving my uncle’s yard and ending their journey two trailers down.
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Under the Table
The headaches, my difficulty focusing, my specimen-daze, that floating island, my spastic, nervous heart—which are side effects from drinking, and which were inevitable?
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Groupings
Guns formed me—there’s no denying it. They worked on my body, bruising it in all the right places. Recoil and report learned they couldn’t scare me off. Each weapon wrote angry truth on me.
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Writing and Drinking and Writing about Drinking
Alcohol and authors. It’s a subject so old and rich and fraught you could write a book on it—which is exactly what Olivia Laing did. That book is called The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink, and Blake Morrison’s review…
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Booze and the Brain
According to a new study, “beer makes men smarter,” or more scientifically stated, drinking alcohol “may enhance creativity problem solving by reducing the mind’s working memory capacity, which is the ability to concentrate on something in particular.” While these findings…
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My Little Brother Ruined My Life
“Are you a masochist?” It’s the first thing Bosco asks me. He’s fourteen years old now, almost my height, 5′ 8″, creamy white skin, and a small, German nose from my stepmother’s side of the family.