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What does a growth of new grass on a hillside in spring make you feel? Is it a mixture of nostalgia and hope? Or what does a distant mountain range wreathed in a crown of clouds make you feel?
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As we go, we are breathlessly held in an in-between state, a limbo, a transition.
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Fenton Johnson discusses his new book, AT THE CENTER OF ALL BEAUTY.
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Paul Lisicky discusses his new memoir, LATER: MY LIFE AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD.
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Seth Rogoff discusses his novels FIRST, THE RAVEN: A PREFACE and THIN RISING VAPORS.
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Poet Suzanne Buffam discusses her latest work, A Pillow Book, sleep remedies that don’t work, and the worries that occupy her mind and keep her from sleep.
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But to become a writer I needed at least to learn about my own superstitions. I needed space in the house to sketch with words. I needed to commit heresies. And those acts had to feel pleasurable.
...moreUnderstanding our origins. The New York Public library is encouraging people to make video games. Thoreau’s world of death. Can drugs help us understand life?
...moreThe Atlantic examines adulthood and how we get there, including a close look at the life of a writer: Henry published his first book…when he was 31 years old, after 12 years of changing jobs and bouncing back and forth between his parents’ home, living on his own, and crashing with a buddy, who believed in […]
...moreOver at the New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz takes aim at beloved transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau for being a humorless hypocrite, abstinence booster, and uninformed impugner of innocent jam-makers: The man who emerges in “Walden” is far closer in spirit to Ayn Rand: suspicious of government, fanatical about individualism, egotistical, élitist, convinced that other people lead pathetic […]
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As you walk, you become intensely aware in two directions. There is the outer world, and there is your head space. It is not necessary or possible really to keep strict focus on one or the other. They blend together.
...moreGenerations of American writers have approached Asian cultures with the best of intentions but repeatedly missed the mark. How can we rescue Asian artists and thinkers like Hokusai from our own desire to experience them as foreign? How can we experience Hokusai not as the Japanese artist, not as one of the roots of European […]
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Journalist Robert Sullivan often documents unlovely corners of the natural world: The Meadowlands (1998) turned a naturalist’s eye on a dispiriting region of northern New Jersey notable for its Mafia dumping grounds, while in Rats (2004) Sullivan gave Ratus norvegicus the Dian Fossey treatment. His latest book, The Thoreau You Don’t Know, attempts to recuperate […]
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