In this reading list, Jeanne Bonner ruminates on the joys of writing by hand and keeping a notebook.
Writing
Posted inStory
None of the President’s Men
Journalism now is a lot more fear and insecurity and a lot less corduroy and Robert Redford, but you’d never know it from what is projected.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Highlight, Quotes, Writing
Racism in Romance, or Why Is the Duke Always White
White people: how many people still think “Fabio!” when they hear “romance novel,” raise your hands. Thought so.
Posted inNonfiction
Orwell’s Last Neighborhood
While envisioning the darkest of futures and grappling with mortality, the English writer retreated to an idyllic Scottish isle to write Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Food, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
Helen Oyeyemi on ‘Gingerbread,’ Fairy Tales, and What Self-Branding Is Doing to Childhood
“I was thinking a lot about childhood as this special status, an almost endangered status … that is eroded the more that we start thinking of ourselves as these units of value and worrying about what we’re worth.”
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
Hanif Abdurraqib on Loving A Tribe Called Quest
“I wasn’t interested in writing the definitive book on A Tribe Called Quest. I was trying to write the definitive book on a single arc of fandom.”
Posted inBooks, Highlight, Quotes, Writing
When Accepting Support Feels Like Becoming a Burden
When Ijeoma Oluo offers to buy her aging white mother a home, her mother worries she’s become a burden.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Science Fiction, Story, Writing
‘Every Woman Writer Feels Like She’s Starting Over Without Any Guides’
Ann Leckie talks about “The Raven Tower,” the erasure of women writers from the canon, the privilege inherent to ‘the anxiety of influence,’ and the power of tradition.
Posted inBooks, History, Nonfiction, Story, Writing
Stalin’s Scheherazade
An opportunistic literary caper became a lifelong con — with no possibility of escape.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
Sam Lipsyte on ‘Mental Archery,’ the Quest for Certainty, and Where All the Money Went
“It’s difficult to say what you really think. You’re too aware of the traps, the dead ends, the cul-de-sacs of utterance: all the ways we let cliché steer us in a certain direction, force us to say not quite what we mean…”