Tag: Literature

Honoring Peter Mayer, founder of Overlook Press, and one of “the stars of book publishing.”

A new Indigenous MFA program is becoming an incubator for Native American writing, free of white Eurocentric standards.

On the passing of a MacArthur Genius forgotten for decades, re-discovered by ‘A Public Space’ editor Brigid Hughes.

After taking over from George Plimpton, Brigid Hughes was pushed out as the editor of The Paris Review and omitted from the magazine’s history.

The first woman translator of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ subtly unpacks the politics of the poem — and of the male translators that preceded her.

Traveling to Arkansas to search for mythic poet Frank Stanford.

Families are complicated. Caring for Grandpa John was even more so.

When life’s greatest pleasure is the one you have to quit.

With her profiles of Toni Morrison, Dave Chapelle, James Baldwin, and more, Ghansah is an unparalleled chronicler of black excellence.

After her father was arrested for fraud, Pearl Abraham began the the slow, painful process of unraveling her Hasidic family ties.

In this short story, the children of Chinese miners in the frontier West struggle to survive after their parents’ death.

Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about how ghosts and authors of fiction share a similar role in today’s culture.

The author talks with The Paris Review about writing, crime fiction, and his depiction of Black American life.

J.K. Rowling’s first book was published 20 years ago today. Did it create better readers, or just more of them?

Fifty years after he published Oranges, one writer traces McPhee’s story to Florida to assess the state of American citrus.

In the essay “So What Shall I Write About?” from Monkey Business magazine, Haruki Murakami gives readers a glimpse into his creative process and how to become a novelist.

Dorothy Allison on how American culture “inherently devalues the poor, the working class, the darks, the queer, the other.”

Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on The Train and Into the Water, reflects on two unreliable things: narrators and memory.

The cover was striking: it showed a syringe. On the back cover one character leaned over a table, snorting cocaine. The calls from radio stations began, the advertising spots, the letters, above all the letters. Girls telling me about their first acid trip. Gay guys who’d been thrown out of their houses. Girls in love […]

George du Maurier’s Trilby, published in 1894, became one of the most popular novels of its time. The story introduced us to a young heroine, Trilby, and a memorable villain, Svengali, whose names have since taken on lives of their own.

At The Awl, Elaheh Nozari explores food in the work of Haruki Murakami: how food not only offers comfort and nutrition, but about how what we eat speaks to our emotional state and who we are as people.

In a prescient post on Jezebel last month, Catherine Nichols wrote about how, in reading Chronicles, Dylan’s 2005 memoir, she came to see the musician her father had introduced her to as a true literary artist.

Black Cardigan is a great newsletter by writer-editor Carrie Frye, who shares dispatches from her reading life. We’re thrilled to share some of them on Longreads. Go here to sign up for her latest updates. *** Harriet Hardiman was ‘a cat’s meat man.’ That is, she went out most days with a handcart full of chopped meat on skewers […]

In the internet age, plagiarizing has become easier to detect—and harder to resist.

Thirty years ago, the world lost a great literary mind—the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. Today, Elizabeth Hyde Stevens revisits the financial conditions that produced this life of pure literature, finding unexpected hope in the darkest period of Borges’ forgotten past.

Lauren Groff on not knowing what you’re doing, the thrill of the mess, and using all your senses to find a way in to the story.

Pulling back the curtain on Carlos Castaneda, one of America’s most secretive and popular authors.

The New York Times’s poetry columnist on the intersection between poetry and politics.

Sherlock Holmes feels uncannily contemporary these days — from his dizzying array of post-hipsterish quirks (Cocaine user! Virtuosic violin player! Exotic tobacco aficionado!) to a social aloofness that feels straight out of a Millennial INTP‘s playbook. (His knack for Twitter-ready aphorisms doesn’t hurt, either.) I’ve been rereading Conan Doyle’s stories for almost 20 years, and the guy has never felt more fresh.

Fifty years later, he awoke one fine morning like Rip Van Winkle, and found himself again with his sea bag on his shoulder looking for anywhere he could live and work. The new owner of his old flat now wanted $4,500 a month, and many of his friends were also evicted, for it seemed their buildings weren’t owned by San Franciscans anymore, but by faceless investors with venture capital. Corporate monoculture had wiped out any unique sense of place, turning the “island city” into an artistic theme park without artists. And he was on the street.