What determines the lengths of novels?

The novel is an extremely flexible form. It can come out in countless shapes, include infinite content, and end up almost any length...

The healthiest way to have dealt with being rejected (or “not having received”) the Erasmus Mundus scholarship from the European Commission is something close to my current plan...

I am 18 years old. It’s the first week of college. I’m sitting in the third row. The classroom is overflowing — students are spilling out of benches, their voices bigger than their bodies — when the professor walks in.

There is a certain beauty in personal disappointment, that is the disappointment we feel liable for ourselves. Knowing that if you miss a goal

Last March, when I went to Las Vegas for the very first time, I made sure to pack pens and paper. I knew we would need the supplies.

The Complicity of Health and Medical Personnel in Post-9/11 Torture

As the American psychologist and architect of the Bush-era torture programme, Dr James Mitchell, took the stand last week, I was reminded of Timothy Snyder’s Twenty Lessons on Tyranny.

You hear stories, growing up, of what you were like as a baby. You used to love to suck on lemon slices, you slept with your face buried in the cat’s fur, you spent every car ride trying to wiggle out of your car seat to look out the...

Nathaniel Kennon Perkins: Mexican Breakfast

It’d been almost ten years since I’d seen my friend Adam. I didn’t even know that he’d gotten married. We’d casually kept in touch through the Internet...

There is no beverage which I have liked "to live with" more than beer; but I have never had a cellar large enough to accommodate much of it, or an establishment numerous enough...

Over more than three decades and thirteen books of poems, Carl Phillips has been conducting an inquiry into intimacy, especially sexual intimacy...

“How does one not write a depressing book about depression?”

Mary Cregan’s debut work of nonfiction, The Scar: A Personal History of Depression and Recovery, is likely shelved in the bookshop’s memoir section.

Prophets often die before their time, usually when the rest of us need their voices most. This was the fate of the English radical poet Sean Bonney, who died last November

Eli S. Evans: Dec. 31st, 2019 – 11:59:59PM

In 2019 I sold my first screenplay experienced the joy of childbirth...

In Conversation With Works of Science Fiction

Well, OK, do you want to ask, like, “How did my parents feel about me going into a creative field?” Is that what you’re working your way toward?

Since it was always a matter of contingent decision, the arrival of January 1st, 2020 was foretold the moment that the Gregorian Calendar was adopted...

It was 11.30am and the temperature was airport. There is nowhere colder or warmer inside the totalizing monochrome space. There is just airport climate.

Jessica Sequeira: Exhausted and Luminous

Winétt de Rokha taught me intensity, the slide from idea to idea that connects images as in dreams, with an overlap of meanings that shifts between...

Alexandra Naughton: a place a feeling something he said to you

It is raining in Crissy Field and you are not allowed to leave the car. It is sunny in the Mission and you are not allowed to leave the car.

People, of course, have always travelled. In earlier times, they did so mainly for conquest, for trade, for survival and occasionally to learn technical skills or philosophies from people of distant lands.

Tucked on a side street in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood is Foyer, a small store specializing in plants, stationery, and “treasures.” On a bleak January day I stopped in for a couple of tillandsia and succulents...

A few years ago I started collaborating with a client on her first book. When we signed the papers, in addition to including the fee structure and the schedule, I added one important stipulation: There is no guarantee that this book will sell.

Susanna Crossman: Riding the Baking Edge #1

The recipe for this French gâteau au chocolat came scrawled on a damp piece of paper, handed to me, along with a wink, a scowl and a bag of oysters, by Albertine, a sea-captain’s wife...

Just across the street, there was the video game parlor. I call it that because it was not really an arcade, though some of the features were shared: a variety of consoles. It was called ABC studios...

Meaningful Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence

In African Freedom, Phyllis Taoua offers a study of “meaningful freedom” in Africa since independence from the perspective of literary studies...

‘from An Explanation of America: Countries and Explanations’ by Robert Pinsky

Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one’s eyes slide above the paper’s edge to the poor woman’s face.

‘Home Thoughts from Aboard Continental Flight 94’ by Daniel Bosch