For 20 years I’ve been bugging my literary-minded friends and colleagues about their most anticipated or most loved summer reads and compiling those lists into our annual Summer Reading List. To celebrate two decades of The List, I asked more contributors than ever, and I asked them all to recommend just one book. This year… Continue reading Summer Reading List, 2022
“A path was a path was a path was a path. A path was a person and a path was a mind, walk, chop, walk, chop.” — Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This “We were seeking out the invisible paths.” — Sylvain Tesson, On the Wandering Paths Every move we make is a… Continue reading You Are Your Path
After a two-year absence, it’s the return of the Summer Reading List! This year we have reading recommendations from newcomers Carla Nappi, Maria Abrams, John Morrison, and Drew S. Burk, and from SRL veterans Lance Strate, Steven Shaviro, Lily Brewer, Ashley Crawford, Alex Burns, Joseph Nechvatal, Peter Lunenfeld, Paul Levinson, Howard Rheingold, and myself. We… Continue reading Summer Reading List, 2021
There’s an episode of The Twilight Zone I watched as a kid called “Time Enough At Last.” I don’t remember all of it, just the end: There’s a man, a bibliophile, he’s the last person left on earth, and he’s ecstatic because he’s surrounded by books. Then he breaks his glasses. One book the protagonist probably wouldn’t… Continue reading The End of the World As We Know It
On the first day of my writing classes, I make my students do the improv-writing one-sentence exercise. It’s the one where you pick a line from some random source—a book, a magazine, a writing partner—and use it as a jumping-off point to write a story. It’s a great exercise for getting unstuck as a writer,… Continue reading Exploring the Expanded Field
