brain pickings
-
Fairy Tales by E. E. Cummings
In the 1920s, while living in Paris, poet E. E. Cummings wrote fairy tales for his only little daughter Nancy, which was an unknown fact until 1965. Only four survived and published in a small booklet accompanied by drawing by Canadian artist…
-
10 Tips On Writing From Joyce Carol Oates
Write your heart out. The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written. FIRST DRAFTS ARE HELL. FINAL DRAFTS, PARADISE. You are writing for your contemporaries — not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your…
-
Beyond Good Writing
Either in content or in style, in subject matter or in rhetorical approach, fiction that is too much like other fiction is bad by definition. However paradoxical it sounds, good writing as a set of strictures (that is, when the…
-
Remembering David Foster Wallace
Five years ago today, groundbreaking writer David Foster Wallace took his own life. Maria Popova at Brain Pickings remembers him with a post excerpting Conversations with David Foster Wallace, a “collection of 22 interviews and profiles of the beloved author.” A…
-
Heaven, According to Hemingway
Maria Popova of Brain Pickings has featured a 1925 letter from Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which Hemingway describes his personal conception of heaven (after playfully guessing at Fitzgerald’s). As an added bonus, check out the snapshot of…
-
Brain Pickings
Brain Pickings made a New Year’s resolution to read more books and write better. They’ve been posting all kinds of interesting writerly and readerly advice. For half a year they’ve been doing a heck of a job summing up Vonnegut…
-
Tattooed Science
Carl Zimmer’s Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed reveals the crossroads between the sciences and tattoo culture. The result is “a weird and wonderful almanac of the lovable geek who immortalized passion for science on their living flesh,” according…