Longreads

Middle C by William Gass Knopf, 416 pp, £19.00, March, ISBN 978 0 307 70163 3 If it’s hard to tell what’s going on in William Gass’s fiction that’s because Gass himself doesn’t always know exactly…

I am not Jackson Pollock. I should say I am not Jackson Pollock, the famous artist, when he walked into the Cedar Tavern and there was a girl sitting in a booth at the back of the bar and he wanted…

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max Granta, 352 pp, £20.00, September, ISBN 978 1 84708 494 1 David Foster Wallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of…

The carpenter Miles Archibald Romney converted to Mormonism in Lower Penwortham in 1837. Four years later he and his wife Elizabeth left England for Nauvoo, Illinois. There he built Joseph Smith a…

"Enbridge Covered Up Oil" reads the hat that John Bolenbaugh wears while filming submerged tar sands crude along the banks of the Kalamazoo River in Battle Creek, Michigan. Photos: Mary Anne…

In the spring of 2006, shortly after the publication of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Slate assembled a panel of three young critics—Meghan O’Rourke, Katie Roiphe,…

Christian Lorentzen Buy The Submission by Amy Waldman Heinemann, 299 pp, 12.99, September 2011, ISBN 978 0 434 01932 8 Amy Waldman proceeds from a simple counterfactual premise: what if the memorial…

And so Martin Amis and his wife, the author Isabel Fonseca, are coming to Cobble Hill. And what's it like being a writer in Brooklyn? "I expect it's like writing in Manhattan," Colson Whitehead once wrote in The New York Times, "but there aren't as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee." More likely, there are other writers walking in front of you. It's a zone of infestation. Not only of novelists but reporters, pundits, poets and those often closeted scribblers who call themselves editors and agents. Not to mention bloggers, or whatever counts for being an online writer these days.