Credit…Rebecca Clarke Audiobooks have let the artist “stay invested in stories while working with my hands.” Her new project: illustrating Jamaica Kincaid’s “An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children.” Credit…Rebecca Clarke What books are on your night stand? “ A Scanner Darkly,” Philip K. Dick; “Trust,” Hernan Diaz. Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, […]
Key points A systematic writing framework offers a method for dramatically improving the teaching of writing. This method received only limited uptake, despite high-profile research publications and textbooks. A focus on writing style might have limited the method’s impacts. Source: Andy Barbour, Envato I remember spending hours commenting painstakingly on my students’ papers when I […]
“Sometimes I think, She’s so funny and smart and interesting ,” Kim Deal famously said about her twin sister and Breeders bandmate, Kelly Deal. “Other times I think, Oh my god, I want to take a knife and gouge her eyes out , she’s getting on my last nerve right now .” I grew up […]
Daniel Knox’s voice plays over the credits of the new horror film Tarot . For longtime fans, it’s a situation that seems kismet. For a guy who’s been singing about ghosts for over 20 years, it was only a matter of time for the cinematic-sounding singer to be featured on the silver screen. We spoke […]
The following is from Hari Kunzru’s Blue Ruin . Kunzru is the author of six novels, Red Pill, White Tears, Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, Transmission, and The Impressionist . He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and writes the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s . He teaches in the […]
How to support a friend through grief: 1. Suffer a tremendous loss early in your life. Perhaps the death of a parent at such a young, pivotal age that grief becomes a central part of who you are. Your homeland. Become comfortable in grief, learn its coastlines and caves intimately, so that when someone you […]
At a recent visit to the doctor, I could hear “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” long before I could see its musicians. It was a jaunty rendition, with synth beats and a full-sized xylophone echoing off the long corridor I had to walk to reception. I suppose it did exactly what it was meant […]
Screenshots from TikTok If you spend any time on BookTok or Bookstagram or book-adjacent Reddit (Bookit? Booddit? Boot?), you’ve probably come across the “book husband.” Since encountering the phrase, I haven’t been able to shake it. I’ve been muttering things around my apartment like “I am, as always, your humble book husband” and “What did […]
A few years ago, a writer friend asked me if there was a specific book that I considered to be my literary Waterloo. Was there a book I had hoped to conquer but hadn’t been able to? While I have long planned to read Stendhal’s The Red and The Black and Dickens’ Bleak House , […]
Now what can I say about the fact that I ended up as a playwright? I wrote novels and poems, and had no desire to write for the theater, but the time came when I did so because, as part of a publicly funded effort to get people to write more modern Norwegian plays, I […]
