Write What You Know? Identity Politics and Fiction

- | 5
It requires a peculiar moment in contemporary culture when certain white male writers can decry that their jobs are harder as white men than if they were minorities. In that way, storytelling as with most things bears a truly striking institutional likeness—to the extent that the enterprise of writing and publishing is an institution—to our current politics.
- | 5

In Defense of Autodidacticism

- | 2
Autodidacticism, I felt, was something miraculous, a mark of irrepressible curiosity, a way of slicing through disciplinary borders.
- | 2

Adapting the Bard: On the Hogarth Shakespeare Project’s Diversity Problem

-
It is disappointing when a project aims to see “the Bard’s plays retold by acclaimed, bestselling novelists and brought to life for a contemporary readership,” yet the writers selected are not ultimately representative of all that contemporary society has to offer.
-

Women Who Want Out

- | 1
Shafrir, Lacey, and Nutting have written novels about women who just want out: of their love lives, their work lives, and the networks that startup culture has engineered to broker mergers between the two. Please, they are saying. Stop it. Leave us alone.
- | 1

The Creative Life: How We Do It (Any Way We Can)

- | 4
We’re everywhere.  Poets and children’s book writers.  Novelists and memoirists.  Painters and sculptors, dancers and actors. We clean your teeth, snake the clogs in your drain, and drop off color copies to your desk during the week. 
- | 4

Art of War: The Legacy of Michael Herr

- | 12
'Dispatches' is Herr’s final draft—he never came back and said, “What I meant was…,” or judged his experience against another’s, or said “I told you so.” I am envious of that ability to take himself out of the game.
- | 12

[REDACTED]: A Brief Hate Affair

- | 14
Oh, my friends!  Oh, the joy!  The sweet, delicious bliss of finding other readers who hate a book as much as you!
- | 14

Bringing Home Baby Reveals Life, Death, and Everything in Between

-
How could I go on when human life begins and ends? How could I go on with such a clear idea of the finiteness of existence? How could I do something as simple as brushing my teeth and climbing into bed in a cool, dark room knowing that babies are born and people die?
-

High School Reading as an Act of Meaningful Aggression

- | 7
I want my students to see reading as something combative, vulgar, assertive—a constant back-and-forth between reading and rereading, moments of stepping outside the text then coming back and battering at it with questions. Something better done in a flak jacket than pajamas.
- | 7

Edgar Allan Poe Was a Broke-Ass Freelancer

- | 7
For his entire oeuvre—all his fiction, poetry, criticism, lectures—Poe earned only about $6,200 in his lifetime, or approximately $191,087 adjusted for inflation.
- | 7

Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Language

- | 3
Words simply don’t do justice to any memory, argument, or work of fiction concocted in the mind. Language is an inadequate but necessary solution for addressing our disparate versions of reality.
- | 3

Racism, Natural History, and Fiction

- | 15
Natural history is not just a grab bag; it’s not neutral, and it’s important that in fiction it not be allowed to become a playground where white people, characters, and authors can retreat into an allegorical fantasy land, as it has functioned in real life for hundreds of years with extreme consequences.
- | 15

Missing Fathers: Reading Hisham Matar in Glasgow

- | 1
Ten years after his disappearance my father remains missing. On the anniversary, I’ve come back to Glasgow to look for him, with Matar’s words for company.
- | 1

My Saucy Bark; or, A Catalogue of Imaginary Novels with Rubbish Titles

- | 5
What is it with this world of imaginary writers and publishers? Why can't its inhabitants come up with better titles for their books?
- | 5

Whose Beach? Our Beach: A Readers’ Guide to Shoreline Access

-
Just as no man is an island, no beach is totally "owned" by someone. Even the famous stars in Malibu, with their yards fronting the beach, can't yell, "Get off my beach-lawn"—although they've tried. Yes, part of that beach belongs to you, Joan Q. Public.
-

My Tree and I: Writing in Nature in New York

- | 3
This tree and I have written many books together, and while I have come up all with the ideas, it deserves a ton of credit too.
- | 3

Text Me: On New Technology in Fiction

- | 21
When writers incorporate new technology into their novels, they run the risk of dating themselves by writing about something that will soon become obsolete. Almost every writer and editor I contacted asked me how long I thought text messages would even be relevant. Would they soon be relics, a particular communication that we used only for a brief period of time?
- | 21

What Gets Lost in Translation Gets Transformed

- | 1
One of the major reasons I found contemporary American short fiction boring in the past is that all that is left after the “move” of the story to Chinese is an undramatic plot.
- | 1