"I boarded a plane, hailed a taxi, scheduled a shuttle, and at last reached Ray Bradbury’s front door." A writer pays tribute to his friend and mentor.
"Solid, ironical, rolling orb!" Walt Whitman, ahead of his time once again with his Civil War epic Drum Taps.
"If we had less smartphone addiction, Hillary Clinton would be our president." The Millions Interview with @courtneymaum.
"Her fragile, remote, bewildered, haughty persona is a construct, a fiction." Taking issue with Joan Didion.
"They say 'kill your darlings,' but I think darlings are your voice." @electricliterature on how to find your signature writing style.
"I’m in no way repentant." Our conversation with Jonathan Lethem.
"A perfect match": On the enduring link between John Bellairs and Edward Gorey.
"I didn’t feel heard, so I stopped needing to be heard, and thus was able to discover my own voice." The Millions Interview with Cole Lavalais.
"When you’re writing a book, you don’t know what you’re doing." The Millions Interview with Edan Lepucki.
"Are they really that rare? Or are the books and essays out there, but we don’t know where to find them?" An absolutely indespensable syllabus of texts on craft by writers of color.
Did somebody say free comic books??
"I think of this staring into the vast openness of the painting, the canvas like a black hole, falling into absence." On Rothko, Zambreno, and the legacy of lost mothers.
"I do think there’s a weirdly authoritarian impulse embedded in the Internet." Our interview with Jarett Kobek.
Can writers retire? We consider a rogue’s gallery of cases, from McGrath to Munro (please say no, Alice).
“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” The 10 most-highlighted passages of The Handmaid's Tale.
"The nightmare started when the police burst into his apartment and dragged him away in the middle of the night, along with the rest of the Petrashevsky Circle." That time a 28-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky was nearly killed for having thoughts against the state.
"[B]ookworms are found to be more intellectually curious than most and find it easier to form open and trusting relationships with others.” It's official, readers get more dates.
“[B]eing twelve is its own psychosexual dystopian satire.” On Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, reading-while-tween, and being a seventh-grade book censor.