Tag: reading

You never stop learning how to read — probably because you also never stop forgetting how to read.

Digitization has changed the way readers experience literature — and examine themselves.

“All the people you could have been had you chosen differently—they haunt the bookstore alongside the person you became and could still become.”

In law school, they told me I wouldn’t be able to read anymore. That the pleasure of the text, like a lover in a non-law degree, would slowly grow opaque to me.

Haters could write the book on hate reading Jonathan Franzen, but he wouldn’t read it and neither would they.

When Anthony Ray Hinton was sentenced to death for two murders he didn’t commit, he used his time to create a book club for death row inmates.

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

An editor reflects on a career in travel writing, even as Americans travel less and are exposed to less diversity.

At The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reports on how reading and writing helped President Obama to “slow down and get perspective” from novelists, memoirists, and historical figures during the eight years of his presidency.

What they don’t tell you about death—or what you don’t really understand until it happens close to you—is how permanent it is. In the months afterward I kept thinking to myself, all right, I get it. This is too painful. Let’s just take a little break from the loss. Let’s have a weekend off. A […]

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.

America, 1981: Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, MTV aired its first video, and the culture wars were on. That January, the Rev. Jerry Falwell—a televangelist-turned-political-kingmaker who essentially invented the religious right as we know it today—had sent a massive direct mailing to his Moral Majority constituency, urging readers to examine their school libraries […]

In the “dark ages” of Europe, people began reading silently to themselves, and a love of books and learning took hold, pioneered by Bede.

Here are pieces I’ve enjoyed, new and old, about the art and business of book cover design.

Though young adult literature has arguably existed since at least Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, which was published in the 1930s, teachers and librarians were slow to accept books for teenagers as a genre. “Today, many librarians are acting like frightened ostriches,” Mary Kingsbury complained in 1971. Afraid of parental criticism and the threat of concerned administrators, she […]

At the time, the stories we read seemed to me a means to an end, grueling exercises for the tender muscles of my developing Arabic. Only more recently have I wondered what it might feel like to read them as someone living under the Assad regime. A story, at its best, can make us feel less […]

“Job title: bookseller.” Every time I sneak a glance at the sheaf of employment forms and tax information, I can’t believe it. That job title is mine, now. It’s a lifelong dream come true, as cliche as that sounds. True to millennial form, I’m going to do Online Things for my local indie: blogging, tweeting, […]

The summer after my freshman year I found myself working as a substitute mail carrier in one of the tony North Shore suburbs outside Chicago. The post office was an intriguing place (just see short stories by Eudora Welty and Herman Melville). I discovered, after a steep learning curve, that I could sort and deliver […]

Below is a guest post from Pravesh Bhardwaj, a filmmaker based in Mumbai who has been posting his favorite short stories all year. 

The iOS app, pending improvements, still might catch on, but if it doesn’t, we’ll have to figure out how to try to keep those subscribers as we fold them back into the original distribution system. We’re also in talks with an established indie publishing house, trying to figure out whether doing a handful of print […]

What her 1972 Paris Review interview reveals about her approach to the craft.

I read far and wide during my ten-year bit. I read all of the longest works of the world, the thousands of pages of Proust and Musil and Joyce and Tolstoy and David Foster Wallace. And I could follow whatever interested me at the time. I acquired a taste for Sir Richard Burton’s 19th century […]

Our Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring New York magazine, Washington Post, The Daily (RIP), Vanity Fair, The Guardian, fiction from The New Yorker and a guest pick by Reine Gammoh.