-
+16 +7
I got it wrong: seven writers on why they changed their minds
Our culture values certainty and dogmatism. We should all be more open about the times when we were wrong – and what made us reconsider. Here, seven writers confess all.
-
+5 +1
The Awkward Art of Book Trailers
If you want to know what’s wrong with the modern book trailer, you might start by watching the one for Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom.” Sitting at a table in front of several rows of bookshelves and looking directly into the camera, Franzen explains—in a tone that is polite but characteristically aggrieved—his “profound discomfort” with having to use moving images to promote the printed word.
-
+6 +3
Writer Ned Vizzini has died at 32
Writer Ned Vizzini died Thursday at age 32 in New York, the city's medical examiner has confirmed. Vizzini committed suicide.
-
+19 +6
Isaac Asimov's 1964 predictions of life in 2014 are prescient
The great science fiction author got a lot right in this New York Times article.
-
+23 +10
The Iceberg: A Story by Zelda Fitzgerald
In 1918, Zelda Sayre, later Zelda Fitzgerald, won a prize for this story, which she published in the Sidney Lanier High School Literary Journal. She was seventeen or eighteen years old when she wrote it; she would soon meet F. Scott Fitzgerald, her escape hatch from the restrictive world of Montgomery, Alabama, into a tumultuous life of literary striving.
-
+17 +4
The Snarky, Clever Comments Hidden in the "Acknowledgments" of Academic Papers
In a modern scientific paper, if you cruise past the “Materials and Methods” section and stop right before you hit the “References,” you’ll find the “Acknowledgments” section, wherein authors are given space to thank others for their contributions to the project. It is generally accepted that this paragraph is ignored by both readers and reviewers alike.
-
+15 +1
The Daily Routines of Famous Writers
Kurt Vonnegut’s recently published daily routine made we wonder how other beloved writers organized their days. So I pored through various old diaries and interviews — many from the fantastic Paris Review archives — and culled a handful of writing routines from some of my favorite authors. Enjoy.
-
+12 +4
The books and the parchments
Stan Mitchell talks about writing in the church
-
+21 +6
56 Things Writers Have Predicted 2014 Will Be "the Year of"
Happy new year! Now that 2013 is out of the way, it's time to get cracking on deciding the what next year is. The Year of the Winter Olympics? The Year of World Peace? Or maybe one of these 56 other options, predicted by writers all over?
-
+24 +11
Writers and Rum: Why Authorship and Alcohol Have Gone Together
I’m just old enough to have seen that literary culture of really big drinkers—and a real culture it was.
-
+15 +4
Harper Lee Makes $9000 A Day From "To Kill A Mockingbird" she wrote 50 years ago.
Harper began writing a collection of short stories about racism in her hometown of Monroeville. She submitted the stories to her agent Michael Crain and an editor at the publishing house J.B. Lippincott & Co. Both men convinced Harper that the stories should be developed into a full length novel. She spent two and a half years crafting what would eventually become "To Kill A Mockingbird".
-
+18 +6
Internet-Speak is Improving English Because Empathy
We hear so much about how English is going to the dogs. But I'm having a hard time seeing those dogs of late. In the way young people are texting, tweeting and just plain talking, I see, of all things, warmth. American English is getting sweeter all the time.
-
+24 +4
Big in Japan
You might not know me, but I’m famous. Until recently, I didn’t know I was famous either, and most days, even now, it’s hard to tell. In 2010 I published a novel, “The Serialist.” It did fine for a debut, which is to say well enough to warrant a second, but my daily life didn’t change much: I wrote, I ran, I hung out with my friends. Then a Japanese translation came out, and things got strange. My book won a major Japanese literary contest, which was nice. Then it won another. Then another.
-
+19 +4
Dan Brown's 'Inferno' tops all book sales in 2013
Dan Brown's 'Inferno:' top bestseller in 2013
-
+30 +4
1984 by George Orwell (free in text format)
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel by George Orwell published in 1949. The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (or, in the government's invented language, Newspeak, called Ingsoc) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite.
-
+21 +5
When ‘Long-Form’ Is Bad Form
Too often, the writer is the hero of his own story.
-
+12 +1
Will We Use Commas in the Future?
There’s no denying that commas are helpful little flecks of punctuation. They allow us to separate written clauses and do good work when especially numerous or complicated groups of things exist in a single sentence. But do we really need them? That’s a trickier question.
-
+12 +1
The Deathbed Confessions of William Butler Yeats
Seventy-five years ago today—on January 28, 1939—William Butler Yeats died at a boarding house on the French Riviera. He was 73 years old, at the height of his fame and glory. “Mr. Yeats frequently let his mind roam far afield in the realm of fancy,” gushed the New York Times obituary, “and it is for the gentle beauty of such works that he was hailed by many as the greatest poet of his time in the English language.”
-
+11 +3
Robots Are Coming for Our Poems
The robots are quickly and surely coming for our jobs, and we've comforted ourselves thus far with a palliative that goes something like this: They can't do our creative work. They won't do our journalism or make our art or write our poetry. Except that the startup Narrative Science has $6 million to execute its human-free reporting.
-
+22 +6
Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators
The psychological origins of waiting (... and waiting, and waiting) to work
Submit a link
Start a discussion