Here are pieces I’ve enjoyed, new and old, about the art and business of book cover design.
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Posted inFiction, Nonfiction, Reading List
Sci-Fi Is for Everyone: Six Stories About Marginalized Groups in Science Fiction
Genre literature has power. Mainstream science fiction, historically, has a representation problem. (Why are there no black people in the future? Or, better yet, why is there only one black person in the future?! Did LGBTQ people disappear, too?) Where does that leave us?
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
Curtis Sittenfeld’s ‘Prep,’ 10 Years Later
Sittenfeld’s smart debut novel about social dynamics at an exclusive boarding school remains relevant—and not just as a “coming of age novel”—a decade after it was first published.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
On Playing Hooky From a Job at the Post Office to Read ‘Ulysses’
The summer after my freshman year I found myself working as a substitute mail carrier in one of the tony North Shore suburbs outside Chicago. The post office was an intriguing place (just see short stories by Eudora Welty and Herman Melville). I discovered, after a steep learning curve, that I could sort and deliver […]
Posted inFiction, Quotes
The Unanswered Question of Race in Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing
It is seldom mentioned that Poe came of age in a slave society, in a household where slaves were present. Poe does nothing to draw attention to the fact. An account of the business interests of Poe’s foster father, John Allan, quoted by the biographer Jeffrey Meyers, notes that he and his partner “as a […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
Judy Blume, on the Age that Defined Her for Life
Judy Blume in The New York Times Magazine.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
E.M. Forster on the Novel and Why Aristotle Was Wrong About Character
The specialty of the novel is that the writer can talk about his characters as well as through them or can arrange for us to listen when they talk to themselves. He has access to self-communings, and from that level he can descend even deeper and peer into the subconscious.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
The House Made of Sugar
A Longreads Exclusive: The newly translated short story from Silvina Ocampo’s collection, Thus Were Their Faces.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Sci-Fi Is for Everyone: Six Stories About Marginalized Groups in Science Fiction
“I’ve included essays about women in sci-fi, as well as queer representation in the genre, because it’s a thrill to see traditionally marginalized groups take on a genre that has so much to offer them. Sci-fi should be for everyone.”
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Loaded Expectations and Hopes of a Fan Relationship
The fan relationship is often built on expectations and hope, however unfair they might be. My expectation going to Dominique [Moceanu]’s hotel that night in 1998 was that she’d come down from her room even after a long day of training and competing, and grant me an autograph or, if I was really lucky, a […]
