When I grow up, I want to be like Vladimir Nabokov, whose early life was a sweep of my dreams of Europe, born to a Russian upperclass family in St. Petersburg, moving to Crimea and then Ukraine and then lock, stock, and barrel to the UK, where Vladimir took up Zoology at Cambridge, and later to...
And the tortured writer When these writers, solitary creatures of the night burning the midnight oil, seek to satisfy their nocturnal cravings, what do they seek to fill up—their grumbling stomachs, their hollow minds, their aching hearts, their restless souls? Hunger is a form of loneliness, or...
If Romeo and Juliet lived happily ever after, would we have reason to remember them? RUMINATE Sufi poet Rumi Was his love of Shams of Tabriz, the nomad, “his master,” his friend and teacher, and companion on the arduous road to wisdom, the ancient Sufi poet Rumi’s secret? Nobody knows the...
Hang back from the horrors of Covid life and take refuge in the metaphors for our larger fears, such as our fear of death or disease or isolation or life itself. Horror as a genre is built around one truth: that the world is full of fearful things. But the best horror tells us more. It tells us how...
An impossible conversation on loss because, like tears, a quote from some of our favorite writers can wash away our sorrows Illustration by Ariana Maralit I’m on a late-night drive, along an empty street, listening to The Smoking Popes . The 1990s pop punk band from Chicago is...
INTO THE JUNGLE Weed out that pesky actually In many cases, when I put on my editor’s hat, I gather my Fiskars machete and my Remington rifle as I prepare for the hunt. I should say for the kill. Every draft is a forest full not so much of predators, which I like because they are swift and...
