“What happened?” “A nervous breakdown. I almost died.” “And you’re still drinking?” “Occasionally, when I think of things.” He smiled, “The wrong things, I suppose. However, I’ve talked enough about myself. What would you like for breakfast?” “What a sad business, being funny,” she said thoughtfully. The table was laid and now he was ready […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
George R.R. Martin: The Rolling Stone Interview
An interview with ‘Game of Thrones’ author George R.R. Martin: You’ve talked before about the original glimpse of the story you had for what became A Song of Ice and Fire: a spontaneous vision in your mind of a boy witnessing a beheading, then finding direwolves in the snow. That’s an interesting genesis. It was […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Tell Me A Story: A Reading List
These four fantastic fiction pieces will take you far away from this perpetual winter.
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction
The Holy Junk Heap
Some 300,000 Jewish documents were hidden in a closet in Cairo for hundreds of years. They were discovered by the lady adventurer twins Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson and the legendary Rabbinical scholar Solomon Schechter. Here is their story.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Loneliness and Solitude: A Reading List
When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Cold Rim of the World
The rise and fall of Pyramiden, a Russian mining town located in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
Will You Love Me Forever?
I left that place still believing in pleasure, but where love was concerned, I had become as atheistic as a mathematician. Two months later, I was sitting alongside that exquisite woman, in her boudoir, on her divan. I held one of her hands clasped in my own, and such lovely hands they were; we were scaling the Alps of emotion, picking […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
Memories of an Affair
Our love affair was chic from beginning to end; the rumpled intellectual and the skilled maîtresse. It was a done thing—the done thing. Beginning to end. Was it the end? She kept things lively, he thought. I counted on that. I used to look forward to work, knowing I’d see her. He pictured himself twined […]
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Interview: ‘Poor Teeth’ Writer Sarah Smarsh on Class and Journalism
“There often is a ‘tone’ in writing about the poor. There is a presumption that people of a certain class are mired in misery.”
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
The Fault in Our Canon: A Reading List About Problems in the Literary Canon
This brief list is but a glimpse of the complex, crucial and ongoing discussion about the importance of inclusivity and the problems with privilege in the literary canon. Please share your recommendations: essays and articles in this vein, books you wish the canon could accept, etc. 1. “On ‘The John Green Effect,’ Contemporary Realism, and […]
