As I’ve said a few times over the years, I have a writing “junk drawer” — a notebook where I jot down ideas for columns. Some of those ideas come to fruition here, but most don’t. So, I have notebooks full of jotted-down quotes and words and “just things I want to remember” that will […]
You’re reading the Read Like the Wind newsletter, for Times subscribers only. Book recommendations from our critic Molly Young and others. Credit…Jackie Molloy for The New York Times Dear readers, Let’s get one thing out of the way: I have zero interest in making you do karaoke. Like most enthusiasts (or so I assume), I […]
WRITING The only thing you need to do to be a writer is write. It can be hard for most people to fit writing time in, though, especially if you’re a parent or have a busy day job. Most writing advice focuses on getting up early in the morning to write before your kids are […]
When I was little, five or six, I was taken to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running juggernaut musical “Cats.” My parents knew that I was already a big fan of cats (the species), and they had strategically hyped Lloyd Webber’s source material, T. S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” What they didn’t know was […]
Book Marks logo Our five-alarm fire of fabulous reviews this week includes Patrick Cottrell on Tracy O’Neill’s Woman of Interest , Phillip Maciak on Emily Nussbaum’s Cue the Sun , Anthony Domestico on Michael Nott’s Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life , Lauren LeBlanc on Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time , and Meara Sharma […]
Illustration of the fairytale “Snow White and Rose Red” by Paul Hey via Wikimedia Commons. Based loosely on a Grimms’ fairytale, Bear is both enchanting and suspenseful. Sam, a concessions worker on a ferry, is terrified when a bear shows up at her family’s front door. Elena, instead, grows enchanted by the bear, seeking him […]
Novelist Maxim Loskutoff joins co-host V.V. Ganeshananthan and guest co-host Matt Gallagher to talk about his new novel, Old King , which is about Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who moved to Montana to withdraw from society. Loskutoff, who grew up in Missoula, Montana, discusses the mythology that draws men like Kaczynski—who sought to be in nature, […]
In May of 2021, I had a mental breakdown, which is the only term I’ve found applicable to what happened that night when my mind shattered into a million pieces, catalyzing a seven-month-plus hellish existence: never-ending panic attacks, debilitating anxiety, deepening episodes of depersonalization and derealization, and the darkest depression I’ve ever known. In August, […]
His memoir began when he was a child, watching his father die young. Mine started when my young children learned their father died by suicide. We were drawn to each other’s perspectives, thought they could inform our own. In a writing class, students often make alliances such as these, friendships based on narrative bonds and […]
I first read Einstein’s Dreams in 1993, very shortly after it was published. The author, Alan Lightman, is a physicist at MIT whose writings have illuminated the intersection of science and the humanities. Einstein’s Dreams , his first work of fiction, explores the variety of dream scenarios that Albert Einstein might have dreamed in the […]
