The New York Times Magazine asked some writers and critics, including me, which 2011 novel they’d have given the Pulitzer to. I say Mat Johnson’s Pym. Nominate your choice here.
I leave for Berlin and Amsterdam a week from today and meanwhile am slammed at work-work and with other work, so I keep not being able to post any of the things I intend to write here. But for the fi...
“My Son Went to Heaven, and All I Got Was a No. 1 Best Seller,” my essay about Heaven is For Real, my own fundamentalist background, and my lifelong doubt, appeared in yesterday’s N...
“People ask me, was writing Fun Home therapeutic? And I feel like, yes it was, but that’s kind of like asking somebody if swimming the English Channel was a good workout for them. That...
“Almost all of the great books are regional books,” Ron Rash (Serena) has said. “Landscape is destiny.” We’ll be talking about his latest novel, The Cove, on April 25, a...
Tuesday night I’m reading with Alexander Chee at the KGB Bar for the True Story Nonfiction Series. Both of our essays are about family mysteries, conversations across generations, and I promise...
In his fiction and in his life, Harry Crews empathized most with the people who needed it most: the freaks, the fuck-ups, people who’d been broken by loss of one kind or another. Crews died yesterday...
I’m finishing up some longer projects and running around for the next little while. Wednesday night, March 28, I’ll be speaking at Butler University, in Indianapolis. On April 10, I read ...
My friend Philip Connors’ excellent Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout is out in paperback. Our Paris Review interview, which spilled over onto this site, is included.
The last time I visited Oxford, Mississippi, at the end of a trip through ancestral haunts in the Delta, I stopped by Faulkner’s grave, Rowan Oak, and Square Books, and consumed my weight in sw...
Last month I sent Darin Strauss a copy of Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori after he overpaid for his part of a cab ride home from a party. In return, he introduced me to the Essential Stories of V.S...
Fannie Farmer’s Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent and Robin Bellinger’s “Feed a Fever, Starve a Cold” inspired my latest New York Times Magazine mini-column. Some...
At Bookslut, Elizabeth Bachner wonders “whether, on average, people are lonelier in real life than in novels.”
“Lost things have their own special category. So long as they’re lost, and felt to be lost, they belong to the imagination and live more vividly than before. They make a mystery.” &...
I spoke with the Nervous Breakdown’s Brad Listi for an hour last month about writing, blogging, day jobs, personal stuff, and why I’m not reviewing nowadays. You can listen at Other Peopl...
On the heels of news that Junot Díaz will have a new collection of stories out this fall, the Times reports that he wrote the introduction to the Library of America’s forthcoming reissue...
My latest New York Times Magazine columnlet draws on a passage from H.L. Mencken’s The American Language (1921) about the word “bug.” “An Englishman,” he says, restricts...
Ellen Ullman’s By Blood is a dark, brooding, and marvelous novel that doesn’t really resemble anything else, though disparate elements of it remind me of so many stories I love. The book ...
I’m interested in James Wood’s writings on religion, including his novel, The Book Against God, which I read recently. Here he is on Santorum’s attitudes toward the environment. (Se...
“The most successful nonfiction books are those that can be boiled down into an argument so that everybody can wade in with an opinion without having to undergo the inconvenience of having to r...
Edward St. Aubyn, whose social comedy is “more reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell or Nancy Mitford than of anyone writing today,” appears Upstairs at the Square this Wednesday.
My latest New York Times Magazine mini-column is on London’s taxi drivers, who memorize 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks to obtain a license; they emerge from the training with a larger hipp...
“Once the Virgin Mary was released into the world, the world took her and ran in different directions.” Jessa Crispin ponders religious icons.
Revisiting the problem of overdosing on beloved writers, or, in Matthew Lickona’s case, filmmakers.
“I think if somebody has to make an artistic work, he will finish it no matter what. It has nothing to do with the money, with the time.” — Marjane Satrapi
“American writers alive today are expected to work as if Gertrude Stein never existed. Gertrude Stein, in her time, had that same problem.” (Via. See also.)
One thing I really like about my friend Laura Miller is that she, like me, is fascinated by literature and technology, and interested in the places they meet. Sometimes that intersection feels like a...
I’m behind on everything around here, even linking to my New York Times Magazine mini-columns. Recently I’ve written about: plans to turn the old Miami Herald building into a casin...
“I’ve always written. I’m from an older generation of programmers [who] did not come out of engineering. [A]ll sorts of people were drawn in from the social sciences and humanities....
I’m still obsessed with the life and writings of Bertrand Russell, and I keep meaning to post the passage from his autobiography that inspired one of my recent New York Times Magazine microcolu...
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