Accompanying a contestant to a pro-level Galaga tournament to discover how many digital space bugs you have to destroy to find renown, community, and a modicum of inner peace.
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Posted inNonfiction
A Prescription for Forgetting
Diane Mehta tries to manage anxiety with meditation that requires her to discard all her memories.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Floor is Lava
“Because children needed to play, to let their imaginations explode. Because pretending was sometimes the only way to get through the day.”
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Story
Trouble
Two women share a history of daring, of lost direction, of dark bedrooms, and an enforced silence they finally break.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, First Chapters, Story
Getting Out the Message To Save Himself
In Don Waters’ short story “Full of Days,” a grieving Las Vegas man uses an anti-abortion billboard to justify his own pained existence.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews
Literature by the Numbers
Data journalist Ben Blatt takes his a mathematical approach to the writers of fiction.
Posted inArts & Culture, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Sports, Story
Smell, Memory
Perfumers evoke the elegance of an imagined tennis game, not the stench of a real one.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Elizabeth Wurtzel Interview
Singer-songwriter Liz Phair interviews author Elizabeth Wurtzel on the occasion of the 20-year reissuing of Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, originally published in 1997. The two discuss writing memoir vs. writing fiction (Phair herself is at work on a novel and a book of linked essays), feminism, motherhood, and music.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Nonfiction, Story
Writing for the Movies: A Letter from Hollywood, 1962
In this classic essay about a classic American art form, legendary screenwriter Daniel Fuchs reflects on his lifetime learning the trade.
Posted inBooks, History, Nonfiction, Story, Writing
Stalin’s Scheherazade
An opportunistic literary caper became a lifelong con — with no possibility of escape.
