Lilith: On Love, Living and Meritocracy

It is said, That Silence a great virtue: It is true, in a Sick person’s chamber, that loves no noise; or at the dead time of night; or at lunchtimes that natural rest

Many years ago, influenced and inspired by several years of reading Arctic and Antarctic literature, I took a January hike in the northern mountains.

If it is true that there are books written to escape from the present moment, and its meanness and its sordidity...

In his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge describes a ‘rotting sea’ full of ‘slimy things.’ What is a slimy thing?

Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments was anonymously published in 1907 and faced immediate backlash in England due to its apparent criticism of Victorian morality.

The apartment was a dive. There was no way to defrost the freezer. It was just a solid block of ice. When you opened the door, it was like looking out a small window after an avalanche.

One is sometimes asked about the "obstacles" that confront young writers who are trying to do good work...

It was by happy coincidence that my review copy of David S. Roh’s Illegal Literature arrived in my mailbox the day I started sending out permission requests for reuse of material for a forthcoming manuscript.

The walking, always the walking, worse when with the wonderful people that opened their lives to me for the day, day and a half, before I returned to the road...

It was 1995, the year Joan Osborne’s “One of Us” was released, the end of my eighth-grade year, in rural Kentucky where homophobia was—and continues to be—rampant. My secret boyfriend and I—the one I had kissed in darkened classrooms

In Jennifer Egan’s The Keep, a former New York club promoter boasts a sixth sense for authority: “Danny could walk in a room and know who had power the way some people know from the feel of the air that it’s going to snow.”

We have a little bit more time. It’s one of the last days of the month, and the clouds have come and so the rain will come and then the snow will come.

Boris Pasternak is best known for writing Doctor Zhivago, a novel which documents these years of national upheaval through the eyes of a poet...

Our first Christmas together, I was 39 weeks pregnant. He let me drag a seven-foot fir tree up the stairs to the flat and sat on the couch with a beer...

Our early literature owes something of its magnificence to the fact that writing was an uncommon art, practised, rather for fame than for money...

Before the confusion sets in, I’m going to try to make some statements, set out a few positions that will also be provocations and, inevitably, generalisations.

There are far too many books about the Brontës, and books about books about the Brontës, for us to be able to track and arrange our knowledge exhaustively.

It is only when we are able to understand the stranger within ourselves (étrangers à nous-mêmes) that we might confront our reasons for creating the stranger.

No one would find the prospect of posthumous fame more appalling than the photographer Vivian Maier.