An essay about women’s writing on the internet, Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, and the potential of fiction writing to expose certain truths.
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
William S. Burroughs on Why He Stopped Taking Drugs
What Burroughs revealed in his 1965 conversation with The Paris Review.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
A Dead Superhero Is a Marvelous Corpse
A theory of superhero suffering and death.
Posted inFiction, Quotes
Mallory Ortberg on the Goofballs of the Western Canon
I went to the kind of college that really does say, “Here is the Western canon, read it.” Which is definitely not the only thing you want to do with your English major, you definitely want to reach beyond that, but it was pretty traditional in that sense. So I read the Western canon and […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What Columbia University’s Investigation Reveals About the Rolling Stone UVA Rape Story
Columbia University’s School of Journalism has released its report investigating what went wrong with Rolling Stone’s story of a rape at UVA, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. Among its conclusions: Rolling Stone’s senior editors are unanimous in the belief that the story’s failure does not require them to change their editorial systems. “It’s not like […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
A Reading List for My 25-Year-Old Self
This list is a birthday gift to me and, I hope, of use to you, too.
Posted inFiction, Quotes
Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’: ‘The Longest and Most Charming Love Letter in Literature’
Orlando has long had a towering, and very much deserved, reputation in the LGBT community; it was published the same year Radclyffe Hall’s controversial The Well of Loneliness, depicting lesbianism as a tragic curse, became a bestseller. Woolf’s creation of a figure who effortlessly changes sex casually upends any notion that biological sex is related […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Tolstoy’s Writing Mirrored His Own Life
There are a number of reasons a writer may waffle on the question of which events in the book match up with her life. Most writers receive the question of whether something in their fiction “really happened” as an accusation, without being exactly sure what they are being accused of. There can be the egotistical […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
When the Messiah Came to America, She Was a Woman
On the rise and fall of American utopia.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Toni Morrison on Why Writers Have Such a Hard Time Writing About Sex
Sex is difficult to write about because it’s just not sexy enough. The only way to write about it is not to write much. Let the reader bring his own sexuality into the text. A writer I usually admire has written about sex in the most off-putting way. There is just too much information. If you start saying “the curve of . . .” you soon sound like a gynecologist.
