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Novelist and singer-songwriter Ben Arthur finds inspiration in Puritan settler Anne Hutchinson, a character in Kurt Anderson’s book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History.
The sophistication of Frank Bidart; Rupi Kaur’s second poetry collection, The Sun and Her Flowers; The Exorcist author’s house for sale; and other news.
“People think of English as this monolithic thing but it’s really not, it’s much more like a river.” Kory Stamper, associate editor at Merriam-Webster and the author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries (Pantheon, 2017), explains what it’s like to define English words and why there are those dots in the middle of words in the dictionary.
Top contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature; winners of the Dayton Literary Peace Prizes; writers organize Hurricane Maria relief; and other news.
“My parents raised me in a white-sided saltbox house, the sort children draw in crayon. Years before we lived there, it had been cut in half and moved across town. We never learned why.” Jeannie Vanasco, who is featured in “The Unknown Yet Inevitable: Debut Literary Nonfiction of 2017” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from her debut memoir, The Glass Eye (Tin House Books, 2017), at the University of Chicago.
Librarian rejects Dr. Seuss books gifted from White House; 150 writers on the writing process; mystery melody in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time identified; and other news.
Letters show Proust paid for favorable reviews of Swann’s Way; Durga Chew-Bose advises writers to take it slow; writer Kit Reed has died; and other news.
Washington State poet laureate Tod Marshall speaks out against Trump; the Nation publishes an unseen Kurt Vonnegut story; the letter that inspired Kerouac’s On the Road; and other news.
Last Friday was the autumnal equinox, one of two times each year when the lengths of day and night in both hemispheres are equal because the sun is directly over the earth’s equator. Jot down several of your favorite memories of experiences that took place this summer during daylight hours, and then several that took place during the darkness of night. Look through your lists and select one daytime memory and one nighttime memory that share an element in common, such as geographical location, people present, or mood. Taking inspiration from the binary nature of the equinox, write a personal essay that focuses half on your daytime memory and half on your nighttime memory, and explores the connections between the two.
Parul Sehgal shares her approach to book criticism; submitting to thirty journals at once; why U.S. and U.K. book covers are different; and other news.
