Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s Work in Progress site has excerpted the first story from A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, the newly released collection of short fiction by the late Lucia Berlin–who died in 2004, and was largely overlooked while she was alive. In the book’s foreword, author Lydia Davis writes, “Perhaps, with the […]
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Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘The Truth of Life’: Paula Fox on the Re- (Re-) Release of Her 1970 Novel
Sari Botton talks to Paula Fox about Fox’s 1970 novel “Desperate Characters.”
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Truther Love
Uncovering the dating habits of conspiracy theorists and the challenges they face.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
The Family That Would Not Live
What can haunted houses and their history tell us about American history and culture? Writer Colin Dickey sets out across America to investigate America’s haunted spaces in order to uncover what their ghost stories say about who we were, are, and will be.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
Phoebe Gloeckner on ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’ and the Women of Juarez
At The Rumpus, Whitney Joiner recently interviewed Phoebe Gloeckner, author of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, the controversial illustrated novel about a girl who loses her virginity to her mother’s boyfriend, originally published in 2002, and just made into a feature film. It was the second time Gloeckner sat down with Joiner—a senior features […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Who Gets to Be a Genius? A Reading List
Why does it often take decades, even centuries, for work by women to be “discovered” and appreciated?
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
Marilynne Robinson on Writing and Discipline
INTERVIEWER Do you keep to a schedule? ROBINSON I really am incapable of discipline. I write when something makes a strong claim on me. When I don’t feel like writing, I absolutely don’t feel like writing. I tried that work ethic thing a couple of times—I can’t say I exhausted its possibilities—but if there’s not […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews
‘The Truth of Life’: Paula Fox on the Re- (Re-) Release of Her 1970 Novel
Sari Botton talks to Paula Fox about Fox’s 1970 novel “Desperate Characters.”
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2016: Under-Recognized Stories
We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in under-recognized stories.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
E.L. Doctorow: 1931-2015
INTERVIEWER Isn’t there an enormous temptation as a fiction writer to take scenes out of history, since you do rely on that so much, and fiddle with them just a little bit? DOCTOROW Well, it’s nothing new, you know. I myself like the way Shakespeare fiddles with history; and Tolstoy. In this country we tend […]
