In Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season , she describes relocating to Sonoma County from San Francisco in 2017, just as the drought-driven wildfire seasons began to accelerate. The turbulence of the years since the pandemic and the out-of-control California wildfires started changed her life, and inspired and shaped her new memoir. “When the pandemic […]
From earliest memory, I knew that my aunt worked in book publishing. As an editor of children’s books at a large, corporate publisher, she would send me boxes upon boxes of cast-offs that she’d find around the office. Even before I had learned how to read, I would thumb through these books in my solitude—as […]
Thomas Hardy with his second wife, Florence. Photograph: Getty Images An exhaustive biography of Thomas Hardy’s romantic life is most fascinating when it chronicles his complicated menage with his wife and a young typist If only I had the talent, I would write the play. The year: 1910, or thereabouts. The scene: a gloomy drawing […]
Bestselling author Kiley Reid’s early attempts to get published were met with a ‘flat out no’ Interview Reid’s first novel ‘Such a Fun Age’ was a literary sensation. As she publishes her second, she talks about cash, class and motherhood Six years ago, the author Kiley Reid was an unknown quantity, with several unpublished books […]
7 Ways to Detect AI Writing. Over the summer, I began seeing the first suspected cases of AI use in the introductory college writing courses that I teach online. Since then, AI-generated essays have become a more common element of these classes. Thankfully, I’ve gotten much better at instantly spotting AI papers thanks to some […]
In 1979, the artist James Inoli Murphy tried out the idea of using string figures—those cat’s-cradle games of loops and knots—to teach math to recalcitrant students. “It is a pleasure, it is an active meditation, and it is an entire ballet—a hand dance that you are doing,” he said the other day, slipping a string […]
ON A VERY chilly Los Angeles evening (I could see my breath and wore a scarf!) I heard Natasha Stagg read from her latest book, Artless: Stories 2019–2023 ( Semiotext(e), 2023), alongside Jackie Wang and Chris Kraus at the Poetic Research Bureau in the Historic Filipinotown neighborhood. The literary trio drew a packed crowd of […]
For years, I avoided technology in my work. Despite my poor research habits, I’d set stories in the decades before my own birth, or worse, I’d construct the literary equivalent of a black box, a setting devoid of temporal artifacts where eternal human struggles could play out without the interference of pesky cell phones. This […]
You’re reading the Food Scene newsletter, Helen Rosner’s guide to what, where, and how to eat. Sign up to receive it in your in-box. Midway through a recent meal at Ilis, a new, dramatic tasting-menu restaurant run by the Danish chef Mads Refslund, I looked up from a piece of carmine-red bigeye tuna loin, mirror-glazed […]
The mother and child inhabit a domestic space that is insular, at times claustrophobic. Photograph: Guido Mieth/Getty Images From the shock and awe of labour to domestic isolation, a wave of recent novels captures the transformative nature of being a mother They say nothing prepares you. Before having my baby, I approached the literature of […]
