Photo by Annie Spratt via Unsplash Hey, girl, it’s me. The book at the bottom of your “To Be Read” pile. I thought maybe tonight we could hang out. You can slip me out from under this stack, slide between my pages, and get to know me better. We deserve some quality time, just you […]
The following is from Hwang Bo-Reum’s debut novel, Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop . Hwang Bo-reum wrote several essay collections: I Read Every Day, I Tried Kickboxing for the First Time and This Distance is Perfect. Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop has sold over 150,000 copies in Korea and been sold into 9 territories. Before […]
Barbara Dee is the author of 14 middle grade novels, including Violets Are Blue and Maybe He Just Likes You . In her essay for PW , Dee reflects on her creative process and her forthcoming book, Unstuck , about a girl who struggles with anxiety and writer’s block. Every writer knows the feeling: you’re […]
I always imagined, that, given the choice, I would read my own audiobook. I had heard memoirs often sounded best in the author’s throat—something about the familiar tang of the hardship unspooled. But had I written a memoir? A bookseller acquaintance asked me that a year before the publication of my debut, and I wasn’t […]
Leslie Jamison’s memoir, Splinters , is available now from Little, Brown, so we asked her a few questions about writing, reading, alternative professions, and more. * How do you tackle writers’ block? Back in my youth, I tackled writers’ block in the time-honored ways: binge drinking and massive amounts of baking. I did so much […]
I feel for my students when I hand them their first essay assignment. Many are mathematicians, students, and teachers who chose to study mathematics partly to avoid writing. But in my mathematics education courses, and the discipline more generally, academic writing is part of our routine practice. Mathematicians face some challenging stereotypes when it comes […]
Photo by Mark Olsen on Unsplash A California Towhee bounced across the deck, its brown feathers tufted like a baby chick’s, proud and naive-looking all at once. I sat very still, fingers poised on my keyboard, silently watching, not wanting to spook it away. I knew its name—towhee—because I had recently become obsessed with birds, […]
Writing can get kind of lonely sometimes. Not only that, but it can get stale. Sometimes we fall into a formula when we write books, or we can’t get ourselves past the first few chapters of an idea, or we’re stuck in the dreaded middle section of our novel for what feels like forever. It […]
Welcome back to another edition of Am I the (Literary) Asshole, the only advice column that asks you to take everything you read here with a grain of salt (and by that, I mean you should have a margarita). Nothing like a little citrus to get the brain juiced up and to keep the scurvy […]
Tone words are essential elements of your writing skillset, pivotal in shaping the reader’s perception and emotional response to your text. These words carry the capacity to subtly influence a narrative’s atmosphere, character dynamics, and overall message, making their selection crucial in writing. This guide is designed to provide an in-depth exploration of tone words, […]
