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This year’s Windham-Campbell Festival kicks off at Yale University on September 13th, and along with a glamorous awards ceremony to honor the winners of $165,000 each grant money, there will be a keynote presentation from none other than Karl Ove Knausgaard, who will try to answer the question, “Why I write…” This years winners, are: FICTION Andre Alexis · The Hidden Keys

Plenty of writers teach. Even famous ones. This is a known fact of the universe. After all, academy jobs are notoriously cushy; what you give up in writing time you get back in the form of a steady salary, summers off, and the nebulous reward of eager minds to mold. As for how exactly they might be molded, well, that’s up to the writer in question. Last week, I started loo

In his new novel Dinner at the Center of the Earth, Nathan Englander takes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the eyes of Z, an American-born Israeli spy, who betrays his adopted country and winds up in a black site prison, a prisoner without a name or number. The General, an Israeli prime minister who has been in a coma for the last seven years, is the only offic

Today marks an important day for lovers of world literature. Bookselling Without Borders is launching a Kickstarter campaign that will serve as an ongoing scholarship fund to send American independent booksellers to international book fairs. The project’s aim is for US booksellers to become bigger advocates for universal voices in their local communities. It’s a crucial mi

The liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else. –George Bernard Shaw In March, when Donald J. Trump tweeted that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had illegally wiretapped Trump Tower before the election, I quickly concluded that the claim was absolutely false. I wasn’t alone in my thinking, of course, but what unset

The 2017 Man Booker shortlist has been announced: Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1  Listen to Paul Auster discuss James Baldwin, activism, and Donald Trump’s rise to power. Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves Read Emily Fridlund on 11 classics of the new gothic canon. Mohsin Hamid, Exit West Read Mohsin Hamid in conversation with Christopher Lydon on migration, progressive politics, and

In eighth grade, I had a social studies teacher who was tall and imposing, with a bold mustache. He wasn’t easily won over. As a kid who was always eager to please my parents and teachers, I really, really wanted to impress him. So when he offered my class the opportunity to participate in an essay contest, I jumped at the chance. What better way to show off just how dedic

Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed is one of the most important and best-loved cookbooks of the 20th century, yet its author remains little known beyond a small circle of food writers and critics. Such is the fate, perhaps, of a woman who lived for more than 30 years in a remote corner of southern Italy—without electricity, modern plumbing, or telephone—and liked to say, de

“Isn’t it true that all the people I know in the world so far are hardly more than puppets for me, serving the glossy contrivings of my imagination?”  * “Storytelling is shaped by two contrary, yet complementary, impulses—one toward brevity, compactness, artful omission; the other toward expansion, amplification, enrichment. The one, practiced most scrupulously, yields eve

Thinking and writing about the United States as an empire has always been full of emotional and ideological pitfalls for historians like myself. During the 40 years of the Cold War, the Soviet bloc used the Marxist-inflected term “imperialist” to denigrate the United States. So this country’s diplomatic historians, operating in a Cold War mode, subscribed to the idea of Am

Mihail Sebastian’s journal—published in English in 2000 as Journal 1935-1944—is an extraordinary document. On the one hand, it is the testament of a Jewish writer from the years when Romania was an ally of Nazi Germany, during which the Romanian state killed over 400,000 Jews, both in Romania itself and an area of Ukraine under Romanian administration. The journal depicts

The house at the center of Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping initially appears as a haven of stability. Set atop a hill in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho, the Foster house stands up to the “outsized landscape and extravagant weather” better than most. Fingerbone is a town built on terrain that “once belonged to the lake”—a large lake that sighs as its w

Believe it or not, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—acclaimed novelist, famous feminist, certified genius—turns 40 today. In recent years, Adichie has become an international authority on feminism, and her TEDx talk “We should all be feminists” and the resulting book version have become so iconic that the sloganized title is gracing t-shirts everywhere these days. (Some of those t

China has undergone profound changes over the past 500 years. At the midpoint of the last millennium, Ming dynasty China was one of the engines of the world economy, one of its largest population centers, and a sphere of unparalleled cultural, literary, and artistic production. Over the ensuing centuries, China witnessed a transformative conquest by a non-Chinese dynasty f

A conversation between Kwame Anthony Appiah, Marlon James, Jamaica Kincaid, Valeria Luiselli, and Colum McCann, moderated by Eric Banks, from issue 20 of PEN, America. __________________________________ Kwame Anthony Appiah: In Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions, the protagonist says something like, “I’ve been told there’s a difference between expatriates and mi

If ever I needed the presence of the gods, now is the time. I arrive at Izumo Taisha, the second-most-sacred shrine in Japan, in early October. According to legend, the sun goddess Amaterasu built the original shrine. In every other part of Japan, the tenth month of the year is known as kannazuki, the month without gods, because every October all eight million Shinto deiti

In the late 1990s, when I decided I wanted to be a writer, I took part in a few writing workshops, and one common thread among them was the vital importance of detail, of describing things beautifully. But a lot of emphasis was also put on precision and economy. This translated to phrases such as “not wasting a single word,” “searching for the exact word,” and “trimming se

We’re all living in a word that comes after Kathy Acker. The post Transgression Has Become So Banal: Chris Kraus and Jarett Kobek in Conversation appeared first on The Millions.

What Americans need to understand is that Trump is not the problem. He is the symptom of a much deeper problem. The post Surviving Koch: Nancy MacLean Wants You to Ignore Donald Trump appeared first on The Millions.

Identifying the various parts of a baseplate compass A: Straight Edge B: Direction-of-Travel Arrow C: Bearing Guide D: Rotating Housing E: Orienting Arrow F: Magnetic Needle Dan Saelinger This story originally appeared on fieldandstream.com. In the movie Pirates of the Caribbean, as you may remember, Johnny Depp’s character, Capt. Jack Sparrow, navigates with a magic compa

IT HAS BEEN A VERY BAD YEAR FOR BUD THE PARROT, but it has been even worse for his former owners Glenna and Martin Duram. Martin is dead, Glenna is in prison for his murder, and it was Bud, a witness to the crime, who tried to rat her out. Really. In 2015, Glenna shot Martin five times in the midst of an argument in their Michigan home. A sensational crime became all the

What, if anything, do you think poetry can do for us in these difficult times? The post Think What a Poem Might Do: A Conversation with Jill Bialosky and Matthew Zapruder appeared first on The Millions.

When you hear the term "peak performer," what do you think of? Odds are it’s someone who routinely operates under intense stress, getting the job done regardless of the difficulties. We think of athletes, lawyers, astronauts. But in their groundbreak

I often find myself on the cusp of doing something productive, and then decide not to. Even though I say to myself, in such circumstances, “Hey, you’re procrastinating,” I still witness myself rationalizing putting that productive thing off. It’s a bewildering feeling you may find familiar. If only I had more willpower, I’d think. Then I wouldn’t experience this embarrassi

Shakespeare was often handmaid to the subjugation of people by English colonialists, who used the playwright as evidence of British superiority, while at the same time he was used by people across Africa in their own striving for national self-determination. The post The Poetry of Subversion: On ‘Shakespeare in Swahililand’ appeared first on The Millions.

Any job is better than no job. Or at least that’s the thinking when it comes to preserving physical and mental health after unemployment. Indeed, many studies have found that the long-term unemployed have at least twice the rate of depression and anx

A recent study suggests that when people spend their extra cash to get help with time-consuming chores, they're likelier to feel better than if they use the money to buy more things.

One of the major reasons I found contemporary American short fiction boring in the past is that all that is left after the “move” of the story to Chinese is an undramatic plot. The post What Gets Lost in Translation Gets Transformed appeared first on The Millions.

When writers incorporate new technology into their novels, they run the risk of dating themselves by writing about something that will soon become obsolete. Almost every writer and editor I contacted asked me how long I thought text messages would even be relevant. Would they soon be relics, a particular communication that we used only for a brief period of time? The post

It’s hard to organize a busy life so that it has enough room for deep friendships, but there are a few strategies that may help.

'Molly' tablets often don't contain much MDMA, because they're packed with fillers. The purest way to get MDMA is in crystal form. Depositphotos Ecstasy doesn’t sound like something you do in a doctor’s office. But the Food and Drug Administration wants that to change. The FDA just approved the substance, more clinically known as MDMA, as a ‘breakthrough’ drug—and will wor

In early 2015 I was writing a novel I was calling We Make the Future about a producer for an Alex Jones-like conspiracy mogul who gets drawn into an actual conspiracy. The plot was a bit convoluted—supporting characters included the starting quarterback for the Houston Texans who loses his mind and begins to think he might be God—and the day-to-day stress of piloting the m

With his flamboyant costuming, elaborate décor and rhapsodic reminiscences, Lorrain is not applying lipstick to the pig of reality, but trying to elevate artifice and anachronism to a way of being in the world. The post Behind the Masks of Jean Lorrain’s ‘Monsieur de Bougrelon’ appeared first on The Millions.

This tree and I have written many books together, and while I have come up all with the ideas, it deserves a ton of credit too. The post My Tree and I: Writing in Nature in New York appeared first on The Millions.

With intricate, narrative precision, The Heart’s Invisible Furies cuts to the heart of what family is, how it is chosen, and how it endures. The post The Equality of Shame: On ‘The Heart’s Invisible Furies’ by John Boyne appeared first on The Millions.