Alice Munro's Writerly Wisdom: Short Stories Aren't Small Stories
The Nobel Prize winner is a role model for writers looking to bridge the personal, domestic details of the short story with the global forces of history, author Kyle Minor says.
By Heart
Authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature.
What Great Artists Need: Solitude
The lesson author Dorthe Nors took from Ingmar Bergman: It's not drugs, poverty, or wild lovers that make a great writer. It's discipline and time alone.
Why Marriage Is the Start of an 'Epic,' According to George Eliot
Rebecca Mead, New Yorker staff writer and author of My Life in Middlemarch, shares what Eliot's Middlemarch taught her about love, marriage, and journalism.
'Life Keeps Changing': Why Stories, Not Science, Explain the World
Author and journalist Jennifer Percy was a committed physics major until a Lawrence Sargent Hall story showed her a more satisfying way to approach life's complexities.
What It Really Means to Be 'Kafkaesque'
Author Ben Marcus says the beautiful but sorrowful strangeness of Kafka's "A Message from the Emperor" make it a perfect piece of writing.
'It Has to Come to You': Why Jim Harrison Writes Patiently
The veteran author says Theodore Roethke's poetry is a reminder that sometimes you're hot, sometimes you're not.
How to Write: A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More
Highlights from 12 months of interviews with writers about their craft and the authors they love
Amy Tan's Lonely, ‘Pixel-by-Pixel’ Writing Method
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” helps remind the Joy Luck Club author to capture the “microscopic” details that make her characters unique.
How Aimee Bender Feels After Memorizing a Poem: 'Caffeinated'
Committing the words of Wallace Stevens to memory unlocked an emotional and physical magic within her, Bender says.
'You Begin to Breathe Again': Samuel Beckett's Humor as a Coping Mechanism
Author Paul Auster says Beckett shows how important laughter is in writing.