New York Times

  • A Higher Art

    In his By the Book interview at the New York Times, Colson Whitehead claims he doesn’t know the name of his all-time favorite novelist: …because they never wrote anything. They had no inkling they had a knack for writing, so…

  • Rumpus Round-Up: All the Abramson News Fit to Print

    Jill Abramson, the first woman to head the New York Times as executive editor, was abruptly fired Wednesday and replaced by managing editor Dean Baquet. The New Yorker attempted to explain why, with the leading theory being Abramson’s discovery several…

  • Prevent the Dog from Barking with a Juicy Bone

    What is it that you do? What is at stake, and where is your heart? Remember Kafka’s imperial messenger? Are you sitting at the window, dreaming? Between the broken satellites, below jaundiced clouds pumped fat with sulfate, through the hazy…

  • The Game of Love

    In both darker and lighter versions of fairy tales, a woman’s suffering is demanded in exchange for true love and happily ever after. She must be trapped in a tower or poisoned by an apple or forced to spin straw…

  • Taking Physics from Einstein When You Want to Be Mrs. Einstein

    Writer Lisa Scottoline was an English Major at University of Pennsylvania when she attended, in the 70s, two seminars with a very special teacher: Philip Roth. Now, she tells on the New York Times’s Sunday Review what it was like to…

  • The Girl with the Hair in Her Mouth

    “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness: those moments when another human being was there in front of me, suffering, and I responded sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly,” George Saunders said in his 2013 commencement address at Syracuse.…

  • For Such Magnificence

    There have been, and will continue to be, a lot of eulogies for Gabriel García Márquez this week. In the Sunday Times, Salman Rushdie has an especially nice meditation on magical realism: But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn’t matter. It would…

  • The Book That Wasn’t

    Seventeen years ago I wrote a book, which you can find on Amazon and Google and elsewhere online. This is unusual only because my book was never published. Jason K. Friedman writes in the New York Times about his book…

  • Writing “the very stuff of life”

    Today in unusual writing jobs: an inside look at what it’s like to be an obituary news writer for the New York Times. Each day, it is our job to come to know such strangers intimately, inhaling their lives through…

  • Like, Considering the Other Side

    Critics might believe that “like” has infiltrated and degraded American English, but John McWhorter argues just the contrary. McWhorter claims that “like” is not a marker of the downfall of spoken language, but instead, a sign of its “growing sophistication.”…

  • This.

    An article from the New York Times comments on the affect social media and Internet slang is having on our language and means of communication. On sentence fragments: “Indeed, fragments are indicative of how quickly we pass judgment while on…

  • Fiction in the Digital Age

    Serialized fiction is experiencing a resurgence, and we have technology to thank. Back in 2012, The Silent History brought the serialized novel to our iPhones (check out our interview with co-author Kevin Moffett here). And now, there’s Wattpad. The New York Times takes…