International Armenian Literary Alliance Launches 3 Grants for Creative Writing and Translation
The International Armenian Literary Alliance’s Creative Writing Grant graphic The International Armenian Literary Alliance announced the launch of three grants for creative writing and translation—each worth $2,500—to one writer and two translators whose work-in-progress show exceptional literary and creative ability. Applications will be open from September 1 to September 30 and the winners will be […]
Influential Writing Mentor Dies
Caroline Rosenstone. Dedication to Rosenstone and handwritten note from former student Natalie Beach in a new book of essays. Caroline Rosenstone, who created and then for over three decades directed a writing program that turned high schoolers into skilled essayists and critics, died this week at the age of 70. The cause of death is […]
9 New Books We Recommend This Week
Our recommended books this week take you from the depths of the ocean to the heights of the sky: Brad Fox’s “The Bathysphere Book” recounts a fascinating episode of deep-sea exploration in the 1930s (with gorgeous illustrations), and S.C. Gwynne’s “His Majesty’s Airship” revisits a British dirigible disaster from 1930 that was even deadlier than […]
Read the first reviews of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. George Orwell’s dystopian masterwork, Nineteen Eight-Four , was first published seventy-four years ago today. Set in a totalitarian London in an imagined future where all citizens are subject to constant government surveillance and historical reeducation, Nineteen Eighty-Four tells the story of […]
A Writer Recognizes Herself in Another Writer’s Story
Keziah Weir writes, “The pages of the short story were crisp like new bills and my heart sped up when I turned them.”Credit…Public/Official THE MYTHMAKERS, by Keziah Weir What navel-gazers we writers of fiction are! It’s an attribute few of us would deny, but while it most often evokes autobiography, even those of us who […]
Beth Lewis on her writing process, literary favourites, and fascination with cults
A massive talent in British fiction, we catch up with Beth Lewis to chat about everything from her writing process to her favourite characters and desert island reads… Having just released her fourth novel, Children of the Sun , Beth Lewis’s storytelling is complex and finely crafted, combining twisting plotlines, intelligent dialogue and ambiguous characters, […]
Everything is Connected: A Reading List of Linked Stories
I grew up in a town of about 1,300 people in Aroostook, the northernmost county in Maine. The economy relied on lumber and farming, and the culture revolved around hunting, fishing, and snowmobiling, as well as a fair amount of gossiping about your neighbors over cups of black coffee (or perhaps something stronger). The town […]
Reading at Full Volume: Seven Books That Feature Rock Music
I’ve been working on a theory about novelists lately: most of us wish we were rock stars. I’m basing this on a few things, like, for example, who wouldn’t want to be a rock star? Also, with all our anonymity, social anxiety disorders, and how we tend to be at our best while wearing sweatpants […]
Capitalists Built the Stage and We’re All Performing Health
In her memoir “A Matter of Appearance,” Emily Wells isn’t selling silver linings or looking away from hard truths Jean-Martin Charcot demonstrating hysteria in a hypnotized patient at the Salpêtrière. Etching by A. Lurat, 1888, after P.A.A. Brouillet, 1887. In a cultural milieu that is increasingly recognizing the value of narratives that describe the experience […]
It’s Okay to Have a Love/Hate Relationship With Your Writing
One of my moments of greatest relief as a writer—equal, perhaps, to the swell and crest of learning that my first novel would be published—was when, decades ago, my Intro to Creative Writing professor assigned Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” and I arrived at this passage: “Very few writers…go about their business feeling dewy and […]