Tag: Writing

The paper redefined the alt-weekly and introduced readers to a new kind of journalist and critic.

Quotas allow superiors to blame failure on subordinates and take credit for success.

These features show a rigorous approach to the truth, a convergence of the of the personal and political, and excellent writing.

The writer showed his students and friends how to remain an artist, even when one becomes a kind of cult figure.

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

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

The beloved creator of Ramona Quimby and Henry Huggins enters her second century.

Caroline Framke shadowed the crew of FX’s Cold War spy drama The Americans during the production of season four episode “Clark’s Place” and explained how the show was made.

In the New Yorker, Naomi Fry writes about Cat Marnell’s new memoir in a piece that’s part review, part analysis of women’s addiction stories.

Data journalist Ben Blatt takes his a mathematical approach to the writers of fiction.

At the Guardian, the author recounts how it takes “hundreds of drafts” and “thousands of incremental adjustments” to form a story into a “hopeful thing.”

The New Yorker staff writer on her new memoir, ‘The Rules Do Not Apply.’

Novelist Nell Zink, in n+1, takes readers on a rambling but sharp journey through writers and novels of the 20th century in the name of exploring realism, compassion, and justice in fiction.

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.

Lit Hub has a compelling essay by “The Last Illusion” author Porochista Khakpour about her struggle to survive early in her career as a novelist.

How the chaotic ’70s shaped the food writer’s literary trajectory.

Publishing asks women — but not men — to be nice, as well as talented. Should we ask men to be more nice, or give women the leeway to be less so?

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.

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.

The writers of the classic 1980 comedy deconstruct their screenplay for New York magazine.

I’ve always been fascinated by how narrative journalism gets commissioned, reported, and published–but the most perplexing part of the entire system is the continued power imbalance between writers and publishers. This imbalance persists in spite of the internet “democratizing” publishing. More digital publishers are embracing feature writing, but the process behind the scenes feels stuck in the past–a time-consuming marathon of […]

Journalist Jacqui Banaszynski’s advice for reporting on the lives of others.

“Editing is a fugue state; the time self-erases.”

“I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.”

After so many years, are you still sure about your decision to remain in the shadows? “Remain in the shadows” is not an expression I like. It savors of plots, assassins. Let’s say that, fifteen years ago, I chose to publish books without having to feel obliged to make a career of being a writer. […]

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what […]

Over at New York magazine, Boris Kachka has a piece looking at how the tiny, Minnesota-based Graywolf Press became a major player in book publishing. As the publisher of books like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (read the first chapter here!) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Graywolf Press has helped turn “the previously unprepossessing genre of the ‘lyric essay’ into a major […]

Veteran status cuts both ways. Because I’m an army veteran, other vets often tell me things they wouldn’t tell those who haven’t served. It is a privilege to be given this confidence, and yet I’m filled with an overwhelming obligation to get their stories right. Although I’m a longtime reporter, writing about veterans has been […]

Former Wall Street Journal reporter Barry Newman reflects on 43 years of feature stories that explore the eccentric humanity of our world.