A MAN IS being murdered outside a child’s window. A prisoner of Auschwitz, he was caught fighting with another captive. As punishment, he’s being drowned in a river. We can’t see the incident, but the child can. He moves over to the window and looks out beyond our field of vision. Almost immediately, he withdraws […]
IN THE CORNER of the internet dedicated to the arcana of MTV’s Teen Mom franchise, the “good edit” is a topic of frequent debate. Whose footage is cut and arranged in an arc towards redemption, whose towards failure? In her new memoir Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story , Leslie Jamison exhibits a similar concern […]
The Blue Line opened, in 1990 The planner, engineer, and architect Earl Gales didn’t enjoy the spotlight much. He liked to fly under the radar, staying in the background while letting other people shine. But he played an important role in creating our rail system, even if it isn’t obvious to riders today. Gales’ dad […]
‘Ripe Figs’ is a short story by the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904). Subtitled ‘An Idyl’, the story is one of the shortest Chopin wrote, running to just one page. She wrote the story on 26 February 1892 and gave it the working title ‘Babette’s Visit’; it was published in Vogue magazine in 1893 (Chopin […]
“Louder Than Hunger” joins a very small shelf of novels and memoirs that address eating disorders from a male point of view. Credit…Ben Wiseman LOUDER THAN HUNGER , by John Schu Jake Stacey is trying to erase himself from the world. Just 13, he is wasting away — shunning food and rollerblading frantically to drop […]
Daisy Denicore, left, and Tanasia Lane in “The Other Side,” a dance performance adapted from the Jacqueline Woodson book at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Jacqueline Woodson has always seen her books while she writes them, visualizing what the characters look like, how they might speak and move. “I imagine them line by line,” she […]
Credit…Siobhan Gallagher For me, mythology isn’t only about gods fighting each other or controlling a hero’s fate. Mythology is about the essence of being human. Myths tap into something universal — they help us understand how to show up in the world. That’s why we come back to them time and again. But often, myths […]
About a year after my essay collection, Some of My Best Friends , was published, I got an email from my editor. Subject line: “Thinking caps, please: a new subtitle.” I’d known that this was coming. When we started kicking around ideas for the paperback, my team saw an opportunity to jazz things up. A […]
Improve your creative writing using Story Bibles Crafting a book series that captures the imagination of readers is a complex task and Authors must weave intricate plots and create believable characters , all while maintaining a consistent and richly detailed universe. if you would like to improve your writing skills and harness the power of […]
My writing desk, which I loved so much and had been with me through a decade of writing and teaching, was built into the wall. We were moving—more space—so I lay under that desk, looking at it to see if I could pry it loose to bring it with us. The basic construction looked simple […]
