Tag
Writing
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AI=B+
“The essays ChatGPT produced in mere seconds are quite plausible as the last-minute work of a rushed undergraduate.”
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“Poetry City”: Iowa City, Iowa
Iowa City is the place where contemporary English literature matters more than anywhere else on earth.
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Novel Dialogue Season 9 Trailer: Writing Against the System with Aarthi Vadde
In the trailer for Season 9 of Novel Dialogue, Aarthi Vadde looks at the web as the predominant platform of cultural life, and one that needs to be understood in light of literary history.
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“Who Made These Rules?”: Claire Messud on What’s Distracting from Good Writing
“I believe in the amazing complexities of what we can express and convey in language if people will only make the effort and take the time.”
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When Language Is Lost, What Can Be Gained?
Aphasia brings up existential questions that get at the heart of human connection: Who are we without language?
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“How a Fire Builds”: Talking with Nina St. Pierre about Mental Illness, Art, and Survival
“In grad school, I’d had this wacky drunken idea that the book had to be meta to be proper.”
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You Could Use the Exercise
In the face of AI, the time is right to practice our writing techniques for invention and surprise.
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The Author and the Eulogist: On Love and Death in Nonfiction
Authorial responsibility to a real subject—living or dead—is one of art’s unresolved and probably unresolvable ethical questions.
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Lahiri’s Metamorphoses
Over eight years have passed since Jhumpa Lahiri announced her intention to leave behind the terrain of English letters and write only in Italian.
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“The Past Survives in the Telling”: Eight Questions for Esther Kinsky
“I never look for inspiration when I embark on a project. My writing evolves from something I’ve seen, heard outside—never from reading.”
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A Hole at the Bottom of the Book
For the writers Annie Ernaux and Hilary Plum, a paradox emerges with each new book: writing attempts “carry to completion” something lived, but also changes the original experience.
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On Not Asking “Should I Insert Myself in the Text?”
“We are obliged to acknowledge what we see and how we organize what we see.”
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“Finding Other Ways to Flow”: The Once and Future Le Guin
“There’s something very solitary in her writing as well. I almost think of it as solitary solidarity.”
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Cristina Rivera Garza: “the traces that shelter us”
One novelist spotlights an object, feeling, or sensation where the relay between past and present, or present and future, becomes visible.
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Difficult Empathies
“What would a successful war novel look like? This question concealed a deeper question I had: What would a truthful Kashmir novel look like?”
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Saying Goodbye to Childhood: An Interview with Javier Zamora
“I hope people will see the heartbreak of a little kid having to grow up and say goodbye to his childhood in order to survive.”
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Ogden & Hardwick’s Everyday Enigmas
“Good afternoon, ma’am. Do you ever feel that it is so hard to know how to be happy?”
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Magnificent Wreck: Samuel Taylor Coleridge at 250
How to interpret Coleridge’s voluminous patchwork of triumphs, fragments, stolen snippets, and unrealized plans? Does any larger pattern emerge?
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“The Breath of Life”: Sheila Heti on Art, Loss, and Immortality
“Let it become the thing that leads you through your days for years on end—just allowing that problem to live in front of you and to guide you.”
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Failure’s Gifts
Even the most successful authors—like Phillis Wheatley and W. E. B. Du Bois—fail to publish all they’d like. What can that reveal about literature?
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How the “New York Times” Covers Black Writers
There has long been a fear that media only makes room for one Black writer at a time. But that’s always been difficult to prove—until now.
