While striving to become a travel writer in the years after Watergate, Thomas Swick discovered that although writing for a newspaper was educational, there was more to be learned through romance with a foreigner.
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Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story, Writing
Letters from Trenton
While striving to become a travel writer in the years after Watergate, Thomas Swick discovered that although writing for a newspaper was educational, there was more to be learned through romance with a foreigner.
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Story, Writing
Derivative Sport: The Journalistic Legacy of David Foster Wallace
Editors and writers discuss the ways David Foster Wallace’s work influenced them and what it was like to work with him.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
A High-End Mover Dishes on Truckstop Hierarchy, Rich People, and Moby Dick
On the beauty and burdens of the long haul.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
A High-End Mover Dishes on Truckstop Hierarchy, Rich People, and Moby Dick
On the beauty and burdens of the long haul.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘Writing Is Selection’: John McPhee on the Art of Omission
Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
The Art of Humorous Nonfiction: A Beer in Brooklyn with the King of the A-Heds
Former Wall Street Journal reporter Barry Newman reflects on 43 years of feature stories that explore the eccentric humanity of our world.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
John McPhee on One Word You Couldn't Publish in The New Yorker
Fuck, fucker, fuckest; fuckest, fucker, fuck. In all my days, I had found that four-letter word—with its silent “c” and its quartzite “k”—more shocking than a thunderclap. My parents thought it was a rhetorical crime. Mr. Shawn actually seemed philosophical about its presence in the language, but not in his periodical. My young daughters, evidently, […]
Posted inNonfiction
Stories of Punctuation and Typographic Marks: A Reading List
Recommended reads on six punctuation marks, from the comma to the asterisk.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Searching for John McPhee’s Secret Writing Tool
A book where you can enter “sport” and end up with “a diversion of the field” — this is in fact the opposite of what I’d known a dictionary to be. This is a book that transmutes plain words into language that’s finer and more vivid and sometimes more rare. No wonder John McPhee wrote […]
