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.
Search results
Posted inQuotes
The Philosophy of French Society
“Of course, since Descartes and the 17th Century there have been other French philosophers and many of them have turned their attention to the processes of human thought but the Cartesian legacy is still very important in the French intellectual tradition. In a Cartesian society, everything is ordered according to clear, precise, mathematical, scientific principles, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Much My Novel Cost Me
Writer Emily Gould on writing books, going into debt and navigating relationships. An excerpt from MFA VS NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction: It was more like the failure occurred in tiny increments over the course of two years, after which it was too late to develop a solid Plan B. I spent some […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact
On David Foster Wallace, storytelling and the slippery line between fact and fiction: Before he sat down with the best tennis player on the planet for a noonday interview in the middle of the 2006 Wimbledon fortnight, David Foster Wallace prepared a script. Atop a notebook page he wrote, “R.Federer Interview Qs.” and below he […]
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
This Is Living
How burdens and values pass from fathers to sons, and the search for that one true thing.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Ghosting: Confessions of a WikiLeaks Ghostwriter
Andrew O’Hagan, in the London Review of Books, recounts the disastrous experience of trying to ghostwrite the autobiography of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. (The publisher later released an unauthorized early draft of the book): I wrote through the night to assemble what we had. The thinness could become a kind of statement, I asserted; it […]
Posted inFiction, Nonfiction, Reading List
Reading List: Leaving the Places We've Lived
Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. Everyone is writing about leaving New York, it seems. But Isaac Fitzgerald just arrived in NYC, and some of the writers in the delightful anthology Goodbye To All That have returned. Of course, there […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Murderer and the Manuscript
Alaric hunt is writing detective novels, while serving a life sentence for murder, arson, robbery and other charges: Alaric Hunt turned 44 in September. He last saw the outside world at 19. He works every day at the prison library in a maximum-security facility in Bishopville, S.C., passing out the same five magazines and newspapers […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014
In 1964, science fiction author and biochemistry professor Isaac Asimov envisioned what life would be like in 2014: Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare “automeals,” heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
Budd & Leni
The story of Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s unlikely collaboration with Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.
