Read More, Live Longer
In a recent study, researchers found that people over fifty who read more—books in particular—lived an average of two years longer than those who didn’t read at all: The researchers discovered…
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The Guardian
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In Conversation with Elizabeth Strout
I love all my characters; every single person I write about, I love. So as I write them, I don’t care how badly they misbehave, because they are who they…
Down, Out, and “Paved With Anguish”
At the Guardian, Tim Cooke investigates why writers’ experiences with homelessness and destitution fascinates readers: So what is the attraction of being down and out? For some, the prospect of real,…
Fiction’s Rise of Female Friendships
Readers are shifting focus from outdated gender expectations and conceptions of identity, and as a result, complex, non-compartmentalized female friendships are blooming in fiction. Books about these friendships are spaces…
Journalism’s Increasing Blind Spot
Barriers for entering journalism are only increasing; according to a report, journalism has “a greater degree of social exclusivity than any other profession”. The Guardian’s Harrison Jones argues that if…
Virgil for All
As part of its ongoing project to digitize its library of more than 80,000 manuscripts, the Vatican has recently digitized a 1,600-year-old edition of Virgil’s Aeneid. Only 76 pages survive what…
It Was an Honor Just to Be Nominated
We would all love to pretend that we’re above the euphoric rush of gaining approval. But winning feels good, and writing that truth in its fullness is a key step to…
Belles of the Box Office
The multifaceted Kirsten Dunst is going to direct a new film version of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and the lovely Dakota Fanning is set to star in it, the…
The Long Con
Literature is full of imposters and noms de plume, from George Eliot to “Robert Galbraith” (aka JK Rowling), but JT LeRoy is something else. George Eliot never did high-end fashion…
Is the Struggle Real?
A rash of confessional memoirs by middle- and upper-class white women (think Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl) has repositioned feminism not as a political movement, but as a…
The Authentic Weakness of Being
… Initiation into the system of words Beckett was working with in the mid-1960s is more complicated, not least because the system was corrupted, a failure… Over at the Guardian,…
Some Books Stay with You
If I can’t remember the words themselves, I can easily remember how I felt as I read them. And that’s always been my goal as a writer: to make readers…