The Other Boy and the Heron
The heron has a robust mythological history across many cultures, and while the meanings differ, many deal with death, rebirth, and transformation.
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The Virtue of Slow Writers
The slow writer embraces the protracted and unpredictable timeline, seeing it not as fraught or frustrating but an opportunity for openness and discovery.
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Tennis Lessons from David Foster Wallace
I was, and still am, the most reviled type of tennis player.
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The Path Is No Path: On Not Becoming a Poet
What makes a poet a poet? There is of course no simple answer. You could argue that self-declaration is enough. You could also argue there must be a measure.
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Pressure-and-Release: Writing Shanghai’s Rooftoppers
I remember crying the day I made a decision about his character: It seemed clear what needed to happen.
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Falling Out of Love with Lyric Poetry
Bang out hundreds of pages of rhyming couplets about something other than your identity or your perceptions, and you, too, will likely fall out of love with lyric poetry.
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YA Isn’t Just for Young Adults
When we have a child or teen at the center of a story, is the categorical difference between YA and adult in the plot, the stakes, or the voice and tone?
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The Quiet Exhilaration of Reading in Italian
Reading Italian literature submerged me into a kind of intoxication—an explosion of sound and thought.
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José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature
American readers have largely forgotten the single greatest writer to come from the Latin American Boom: Chilean novelist José Donoso.
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The Sublime Poetics of Linda Gregg
Linda Gregg was looking to model truth, that finicky thing impossible to hold in its entirety.
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Éric Vuillard Is Rewriting the Writing of History
Vuillard doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that his quest for murky truths sometimes forces him to speculate.
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The Book that Made the Bard: 400 Years of Shakespeare’s Folio
The Folio is our gateway to Shakespeare; it's also a cautionary tale.
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How the World’s Most Famous Book Was Made
The creation of Shakespeare's Folio was not straightforward, and the people who compiled it had their own aims with its publication.
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The Miracle of Photography
The invention of photography, less than 200 years old, seems both strangely recent and perilously distant.
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Visions of Summertime Sadness and Solitude in ‘The Green Ray’
Romance, like film, is in large part projection.
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On the Tyranny of Slush Piles
The difficulty is that art, and especially complex art, fundamentally resists large-scale comparative evaluation.
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