When someone told me Larry Kramer had died, the words were nonsense to my ears; they simply did not compute. The Larry I knew wasn't capable of being felled by anything, including death"he w…
Writer Celeste Ng explains the Gen X bookstore experience, including those joys of the mall: "I grew up haunting the B. Dalton and Waldenbooks in the mall. So my first indies"the long-gone B…
Chris Harris: "I imagine it's popular in grade schools because it's a simple format. Then again, My Dinner with André has a simple format, but I'm guessing it doesn't play gangbusters at a …
"In interviews, he seemed to delight in airing his grievances about other writers' work, especially when he considered them unfairly beloved by the public. Reading his complaints half a cent…
As we try to navigate through an age defined by particularly egregious bullshit, writers have a moral obligation to avoid infecting the universe with more careless storytelling. It's a privi…
Here's the deal: "We owe translators, and perhaps also ourselves, some recognition of what it might have meant to have handled every single word (space and punctuation mark) of the writing-t…
Andrew Sean Greer: "I think every novelist has a list of novels they never wrote - and never plan to write. Some are impossible dreams. Some are good ideas over a bad bottle of wine. And som…
"Perhaps the oldest oral library in the world was formed over a span of tens of thousands of years in the arid lands of central Australia. There, the Arrernte people developed a complex syst…
The discussion of modernist poet Lola Ridge spurs a call to arms, or rather to pens: "Gender is part of who gets remembered. In 2015, 71.7 percent of biographies were about men and 31 per ce…
From an interview published this year: "Dictators are always afraid of poets. This seems kind of weird to a lot of Americans to whom poets are not political beings, but it doesn't seem a bit…
Few writers come close to possessing the power and influence advice-givers wield. They literally tell people what to do! And people listen! Even though they often aren't licensed to be givin…
Despite centuries of research, nobody fully understands how the convoluted mesh of biological tissue inside our heads produces the experiences of our everyday life. Gazillions of electrical,…
The "world's first novel" is an epic quest, full of monsters and trials by combat - and kids who grew up on Marvel, Star Wars, and video games really get it.
Wow: "In her mother, Louisa saw a powerful figure, capable of acting independently of a man, indeed standing in a man's position by way of supporting the household, and, at critical points w…
"Librarianship asks you to do 12 things at once and then when you're in the middle of those projects wonders if you've got any tax forms left or an eclipse viewer. It's endless questions. It…
How did independent bookstores bounce back against Amazon - and what could other retail industries learn? This is exactly what a professor of organizational ethnography set out to study in 2…
Whew, Jean-Jacques, WYD? "Rousseau did not pull any punches: according to him, far from contributing to the purification of morals, the sciences and the arts had had the opposite effect. The…
Playwright Dan O'Brien: "When you or a loved one are gravely ill you can't help but feel that now is undeniably, inescapably now. ... When one is gravely ill, anything can happen, and someti…