Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them combines genres to tell stories about Batuman’s adventures as a graduate student.
“The number of books I buy while sober is, I have noticed, inversely proportional to the number I buy while drunk. It’s a zero-sum game, as Proust once observed of…
(Which includes me.) “The workshop’s most famous mantras – ‘Murder your darlings,’ ‘Omit needless words,’ ‘Show, don’t tell’ – also betray a view of writing as self-indulgence, an excess to…
This week in New York Bill Gates talks with his dad, the Joan Rivers documentary screens, Christopher Hitchens talks about his new memoir, Isabella Rossellini talks to Leonard Lopate, KGB…
This week in New York Keith Gessen and Elif Batuman talk, Guernica has a reading, Joanna Newsom sings and plays harp, Marcel Dzama appears, talks and signs books, The Moth…