Today I was so relieved to get a migraine. For the past thirty-plus years I’ve gotten migraines regularly; they were part of the whether that happened within and without. I would get a migraine after a manic jag. I would get a migraine before a blizzard. Now I rarely get them. I don’t want to […]
A. N. Devers
Posted inFiction, Quotes
John Keene’s ‘Rivers,’ A Speculative Huck Finn-Inspired Short Story
Huckleberry seized my hand, clasping it so tight he brought back in a quick flood of feelings those years with the Widow Watson, and whispered as if he wanted only me and not his friend to hear, “You take care of yourself, Jim, and keep out of all that trouble, please, cause this world is […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Novelist Samantha Hunt Contemplates Her Obsession with One Direction, and Mortality, Too
I love it here. I love girls, my three girls in particular. But I also love the hormonal girls who fill the ranks of 1D’s fans, Directioners. They are unembarrassed by their extreme passions. They are honestly mad for love or whatever chemistry the band is brewing in their bodies. The documentary film Crazy About One […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
Between Generals: A Newly Translated Short Story by Antonio Tabucchi
The complicated history of one of New York City’s immigrants, a former Hungarian General who realizes he spent one of his best days with his worst enemies.
Posted inBooks, Fiction
Between Generals: A Newly Translated Short Story by Antonio Tabucchi
The complicated history of one of New York City’s immigrants, a former Hungarian General who realizes he spent one of his best days with his worst enemies.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Fight Club of Motivational Books
The professional cannot take rejection personally because to do so reinforces Resistance. Editors are not the enemy; critics are not the enemy. Resistance is the enemy. The battle is inside our own heads. We cannot let external criticism, even if it’s true, fortify our internal foe. The foe is strong enough already. A professional schools […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
The Woes of the Corporate Anthropologist
In classical anthropology, there’s a rigid distinction between “field” and “home.” Field’s where you go to do your research, immersing yourself, sometimes at great personal risk, in a maelstrom of raw, unsorted happening. Home’s where you go to sort and tame it: catalogue it, analyze it, transform it in to something meaningful. But when the […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
Is Keeping a Diary Harmful to Your Daily Existence?
In Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, writer Sarah Manguso meditates on her decades-long obsession with keeping a minutiae-filled diary of her daily life, a practice she has decided is a vice. She discusses being the envy of others who covet her dedication and focus on the project, how her memory of actual events has been effected […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Elena Ferrante on the Historic Struggle of Women Writers
INTERVIEWER Do you think female fiction is constitutionally weak? FERRANTE Not at all. I’m talking about my adolescent anxieties. For obvious historical reasons, women’s writing has a less dense and varied tradition than male writing, but it has extremely high points and also an extraordinary foundational value—just think of Jane Austen. The twentieth century, besides, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
National Audubon Society v. Jonathan Franzen
It’s not clear what the Audubon Society did to piss off Jonathan Franzen. But the Audubon that emerges from Franzen’s essay is a band of once-scrappy conservationists who have grown content to peddle squeaky plush toys and holiday cards; we’ve seized on climate change, apparently, in a last grab at relevance. In order to gin up […]