My writer friends tend to see my new world as grist for writing, and I suppose it is. But this is also my life, not some sociological quest. I am not play-acting the soldier’s wife; my husband is not play-acting deployment; we are not play-acting strained 1 AM phone conversations that are being monitored in […]
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Gravity
‘My daughter doesn’t have a father, or, she has two fathers, since I don’t know which man her father is. One of her fathers says it’s like Schrödinger’s cat in there.’
Smearch, Fidgital, Skinjecture: Creating New Terms for the Modern World
Lizzie Skurnick on her new book of neologisms and why she’s republishing beloved young adult books from her youth.
The Inscrutable Tragedy of Reetika Vazirani
Why did a talented, generous, brilliant poet destroy herself and the person she loved most in the world?
Life as a Teenage Girl, Living with Doris Lessing
It was a famously cold winter. I’d come from a snowbound Hove, where I’d spent hours sitting and brooding, wrapped up but shivering on the frozen pebbled beach staring out at an icy sea, writing poetry about seagulls and loneliness (no longer extant, thank heavens, though that’s not to say that I wouldn’t write about […]
How To Win a Million Dollars Writing Poetry in Abu Dhabi
As poetry readings go, the setting was unique. The Al Raha Beach Theatre in Abu Dhabi boasted light-up floors, backdrop projections and a light show of a kind that would be familiar to fans of Pop Idol, X Factor or America’s Got Talent. Since February, global audiences of up to 70 million have tuned in […]
Looking for Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles
Tracing Raymond Chandler’s early days in L.A.
To Consider Myself a Human Being
How China remembers the Cultural Revolution.
An Ode to du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca,’ by Rachel Pastan
“Sometimes a book that is wonderful and well-told and riveting is overlooked. I believe this is the case with Rachel Pastan’s Alena.”
The Radical Pessimism of Dashiell Hammett
The stories of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler once wrote, “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”
