The Madman's Interpreters
...of his other writings. There he explains that he generated his texts with an elaborate method known as the “procédé,” based on the use of puns. Though his writing was...
Grooming Style
A conversation on how the Alt Lit scene’s documentation of sexual violence became a style of supposed sincerity
Interview with Kate Zambreno
...My Sister. In Heroines, Zambreno courts the ghosts and memories of the modernist wives and mistresses, asking why these women, artists and writers themselves, served as lovers and muses of...
What's the Matter With the Modern World: Jonathan Franzen
...well known for her aphorisms – for example, "Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill" – and at the height of her popularity she...
Open Channels
...“opening its fictional world onto a set of demands determined by the individual reader.” This is especially true in slash, a subgenre of fan fiction where writers imagine queer sexual...
Post-Exotic Novels, Nȯvelles, and Novelists: Part Two
...mediation between indescribable forces, known only to the shaman, and a clientele of beggars, anxious querents, and sometimes tourists who have come at random. Mediation takes the form of a...
Opening the Gate
...Côte d’Ivoire—Edwige was named one of the Africa39 (39 of the most promising writers under 40 from sub-Saharan Africa), was a PEN International New Voices award judge, and took part...
Belles Lettres
...was known less for her beauty and more for her genius. “One felt that if she had been prettier she would have had emotions instead of ideas,” Wharton writes. “A...
Chinua Achebe and the Damnation of Faint Praise
...origination, until one is left only to reflect on the ways that Okonkwo’s unknowability gets known, the ways that fictive truths take the place of a true truth eternally deferred....
Contemporary Scottish Friction
...but not quite, oh no not quite, not ever broken or forgotten.” And the rumbling amongst the writers and the artists and the songwriters is growing only louder now that...
Percival Everett by Percival Everett
...like it. WATER So I’m writing about Percival Everett as a black writer, and I’m telling you that he has known rivers, ancient as the world and older than the...
Un(der)seen Cinema: Tomato Is Another Day
...etc. To others, Watson will be known for directing The Fall of the House of Usher and Lot in Sodom, important early works in the American Avant-Garde. Heavily influenced by...
Sunday Reading
...alive, and writers like writing for publications that will get them read. The stuff that results from this process — professional writers producing professional writing — is often really great....
So You Want to Be a #Longreads Superstar
...very small tier of commercially successful non-fiction writers who aren’t obvious frauds — doesn’t just want to be critically acclaimed or best-selling. He wants to be Us Weekly famous. You...
Trouble at the Language Lab
...want and try to resist the role of the authority, but young writers are still going to be subordinated to their older teachers and the teachers themselves subtly limited by...
Things to Come
...the Symposium for African Writers. It has been edited for length; The transcript in full appears at Jalada. Before the panel discussion, Samatar read from her short story “Ogres of...