My alcohol story seems like a non-story: I grew up in a home of teetotalers.
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Young Adult Literature Won Over Librarians
Though young adult literature has arguably existed since at least Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, which was published in the 1930s, teachers and librarians were slow to accept books for teenagers as a genre. “Today, many librarians are acting like frightened ostriches,” Mary Kingsbury complained in 1971. Afraid of parental criticism and the threat of concerned administrators, she […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Get to Know the National Book Award Finalists for Nonfiction
This reading list features the five nonfiction nominees for the National Book Awards. The winner be announced on November 18, 2015.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Amy Winehouse Documentary Doesn’t Pander
Like Senna’s, Winehouse’s family co-operated with Kapadia, but unlike them, they are displeased with the film, and it’s not hard to see why. As well as a welcome portrait of the frequently caricatured Winehouse as an (exceptional) artist and as a person, Amy is an indictment of those around her, especially her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, […]
Posted inNonfiction
A Liberated Woman: The Story of Margaret King
Inspired by her governess, the radical feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret King cast aside her immense privilege, cross-dressed as a man to go to medical school, and inspired a new generation of women to push against the rigid conventions of their era.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
The Art and Business of Book Covers
Here are pieces I’ve enjoyed, new and old, about the art and business of book cover design.
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, Quotes, Story
How Mary Karr Teaches Her Students About Memory: A Short Excerpt from ‘The Art of Memoir’
The celebrated memoirist uses a little deception and a judicious ‘fuck’ to make a point.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Lidia Yuknavitch on Mythologies We Adopt to Make Sense of Violence
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of the acclaimed new novel The Small Backs of Children, has a haunting essay up at Guernica about “Laume,” a mythological water spirit and guardian of all children that her Lithuanian grandmother introduced her to when she was young, and about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of violence and […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Postwar New York: The Supreme Metropolis of the Present
Forty labor strikes on one day, French existentialists on the loose, and a 50-foot G.I. blowing enormous puffs of REAL smoke.
