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Why the Best Writing Advice Is Often the Weirdest
In a talk on the “art of rough drafting,” George Saunders, the Phil Jackson of writing teachers, says he’s learned, through writing and…
Tag
writers
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The Myth of the Perfect Writer’s Room
In touring the history of writerly spaces, “The Writer’s Room” elegantly describes the rooms kept by Maya Angelou, Charles Dickens, Joan…
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The Brilliance and the Badness of “The Sun Also Rises”
The second sentence is “Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.” Even to my…
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The Wild, Sad Life of John Cage’s First Lover
Why not New York? Personal factors may have been at work: in L.A., Cage’s parents could provide support. But L.A. was also coming into its…
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George Saunders and Zadie Smith Talk with Deborah Treisman
On October 25, 2025, the writers George Saunders and Zadie Smith took the stage with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman,…
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László Krasznahorkai and Contemporary Europe’s Perilous Reality
In 2011, I wrote that reading László Krasznahorkai “is a little like seeing a group of people standing in a circle in a town square,…
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Culture
Chris Kraus Reinvents the True-Crime Novel
On a recent Sunday morning, I took a bus to Williamsburg to meet Chris Kraus, the seventy-year-old writer who attained permanent literary…
Business
Rachel Kushner’s Advice to Writers
The novelist Rachel Kushner recently taught a class at Stanford that concerned, as the course catalogue advertised it, “the sacred art of…
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Curzio Malaparte’s Shock Tactics
“You’re a born Fascist, one of the authentic ones,” the Italian writer Piero Gobetti wrote to his friend Curzio Malaparte in 1925, three…
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An Enduring Archive of Queer Writers’ Portraits
Giard grew up in a working-class family in Hartford, Connecticut. When he entered public high school, he was shunted onto the remedial…
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Why Do Doctors Write?
The first patient I ever wrote about wasn’t actually my patient; as a first-year medical student, that possessive grammatical…
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When a Writer Takes to the Stage
Writers who contemplate going onstage tend to fall into two camps: those who know better and those who should but don’t. Of the second…
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Hollywood writers say AI is ripping off their work. They want studios to sue
When the Writers Guild of America approved a contract with major studios in 2023, ending a 148-day strike, the union became the first…
Business
Writers Guild demands studios stop tech companies from training AI on their work
Writers Guild of America this week sent a letter to major Hollywood studios asking them to take action against tech companies that are…