Hilton Als Staff writer You’re reading the Goings On newsletter, a guide to what we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Sign up to receive it in your in-box. Charlie Atlas was the first director to ask me to write for film. This was a long time ago—the mid-nineteen-eighties—and he was trying to complete […]
Screenshot of The Expatriates on Prime Video I have spent nearly all my adult life living in foreign countries. That includes working, dating, marrying, and now—parenting abroad. Aside from the potential challenges of language and geography, what it means for a woman to be in a foreign land is to understand and navigate the joys […]
Knowing that someone held a pen to write the words in a letter elevates the correspondence far beyond something sent via phone or computer. Handwriting makes us better writers, free of the suggestions of spelling and grammar apps, and it represents something of our personalities Recently, I found a letter my mum had written me […]
There had been concern when Jean and Emma got together that he was too serious, macho. I perhaps had it wrong that he had in art school driven to Chernobyl, uprooted a tree, and brought it back to France—a foreigner, I was capable of wild misunderstandings—but this was the story that had come to seem […]
“It begins like this” by Ala Fox The year I turned twelve, Mom and I talked a lot about death. Ever since my older sister, Shira, learned about the concept of infinity in school, she’s been scaring me with ideas about the universe and what happens when you die. I get terrified thinking about it, […]
Photo by David Klein on Unsplash The poet’s journey from writing verse to lyric essays to memoir is now a veritable pipeline, with more and more poets turning away from lines and stanzas to incorporate poetic techniques into prose. Poetry can often be rooted in memory already, using imagery and figurative language to explore the […]
Hello again! We’re back with another installment of Am I the Literary Asshole , an advice column that’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery and dunked inside a vodka tonic, much like a slice of fresh lime. Delightful! Today I’m coming to you live from the airport bar. Nothing says enjoy yourself to the fullest […]
As a young reader, I loved any book in which the characters created a home for themselves. The Boxcar Children moved into their boxcar, the kids in The Egypt Game created their own little world behind an antique shop, and I swooned. I can’t have been the only one, either, because so many great children’s […]
Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles EILEEN MYLES is an award-winning poet and writer who has published more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. They have received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, four Lambda Literary Awards, and the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, among myriad other honors. […]
I first became aware of Paul Auster, who died on April 30, from reading old issues of The Columbia Review when I was a student at the university. He translated French Surrealist poetry and wrote prose fiction, set in a sort of silent-movie cityscape that anticipated his novels and films. He was already established by […]
