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Science for the Masses: Mary Roach Reports
by Nicole Wolverton 1. The devil is in the details, and nowhere is that more obvious than in Mary Roach’s body of work. Roach writes nonfiction science, and these books are far from the dry and boring...
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Penelope Fitzgerald: Outrunning “Time’s Winged Chariot”
by Evelyn Somers 1. Penelope Knox Fitzgerald was born in 1916, into a family of religious and intellectual accomplishment, and educated accordingly, at Somerville College, Oxford. But the unexpected...
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Abigail Thomas: Accidentally Deliberate
by Amy Weldon 1. In deep midwinter, ten adults gather at my table in a room next to a downtown welding shop, notebooks and pens in front of them. They’re here because they can’t put aside the nagging...
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Q&A With Abigail Thomas
by Amy Weldon Amy Weldon: Can you talk about your father—the doctor, scientist, and writer Lewis Thomas. Did he have an influence on your own work? Abigail Thomas: My father had a rhythm to his...
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Nina Schuyler: “Like most writers, I work at the edges of the day”
by Terry Hong 1. Wife, mother, teacher, poet, writer—Nina Schuyler wears many labels. Her youngest is still a toddler, she balances multiple part-time jobs, keeps up with the daily-life expectations of...
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Ellen Meloy: Understanding Everything
by Jane Hammons 1. The members of my family who are not Cherokee did not come to the United States aboard the Mayflower, pass through Ellis or Angel Island, or cross either the Mexican or Canadian...
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Abigail Thomas: Accidentally Deliberate
by Amy Weldon 1. In deep midwinter, ten adults gather at my table in a room next to a downtown welding shop, notebooks and pens in front of them. They’re here because they can’t put aside the nagging...
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Nicholson Baker: On Love, Evil, and Old Things
by Sonya Chung 1. Off the bat: I love a novel whose protagonist provides me with a good reading list. In The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker’s Paul Chowder—a minor poet who is struggling to write the...
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Jules et Jim et Henri-Pierre et François
by Lisa Peet 1. Midway through François Truffaut’s 1962 film “Jules et Jim,” after the two eponymous friends have returned from fighting on opposite sides during World War I, Jim tells Jules a sad tale...
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I’m Out Here by Myself: The Fiction of Edward P. Jones
by Edward Porter 1. Edward P. Jones collects netsuke—miniature figures typically carved out of ivory or wood, that were originally a kind of decorative button which Japanese men attached to the sash of...
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You’ve Come a Long Way, Lady James
by Jill Kronstadt 1. Years ago, a friend of mine complained about the lack of intellectual stimulation at his day job. He gave as an example a coworker who spent her breaks reading—insert scorn here—a...
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IN HER OWN WORDS: P.D. James
Monday brought us an excellent profile of the crime writer P.D. James, and the quotes below reveal many of the characteristics that define James’s work. They show us the author’s dry wit and clear...
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Bruno Schulz: Living in the Republic of Dreams
by Nicki Leone 1. “Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible...
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“To transform suffering into art”: Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan
by Terry Hong While the Vietnam War ended for the United States with the April 1975 military withdrawal, death and destruction continued, moving into neighboring Cambodia and Laos. With the evacuation...
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Q&A with Vaddey Ratner
by Terry Hong Almost two years after Vaddey Ratner made her New York Times bestselling debut with In the Shadow of the Banyan—her fictionalized account of her survival, as a young child, of the Khmer...
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Hesh Kestin: Deadlines, Word Counts, and Magnificent Lies
by Lisa Peet 1. Just as an artist needs to identify his light source before beginning a painting, a writer looks for a narrative power source—what sets the story in motion, or what obstructs it....
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IN HIS OWN WORDS: Hesh Kestin
In Lisa Peet’s profile of “recovering journalist” Hesh Kestin, he was generously forthcoming about growing up in Brooklyn, 20 years as a foreign correspondent, and his philosophy of writing. Below are...
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Quilting Without a Pattern: On Making a First Novel
by Kim Church I don’t quilt. I don’t even sew. But I regularly watch a sewing show, which for me is like watching magic. The host of the show, Nancy, sometimes uses the word herself: “And then a little...
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“Everything Rich and Strange”: Maureen Stanton’s Journey into Flea-Market...
by Evelyn Somers 1. When I first saw the title of Maureen Stanton’s book, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: An Insider’s Look at the World of Flea Markets, Antiques, and Collecting (the Penguin Press,...
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Ruth Stone: Poet of Wonder and Grief
by Athena Kildegaard Some years ago I read One Art: Letters of Elizabeth Bishop, the selected letters of Elizabeth Bishop, and felt, as I read, as if she were addressing those letters to me: they were...
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