The Rooster Nonfiction Pop-up: Wrap-up
A final discussion with Sarah Hepola, Rosecrans Baldwin, and Andrew Womack about the three memoirs we read this month.
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The Rooster Nonfiction Pop-up: Priestdaddy, Second Half
Today we wrap up our third and final book in this month's reading, as Sarah Hepola and Andrew Womack discuss the culmination of Patricia Lockwood's memoir, which ends up being about so much more than her father.
The Rooster Nonfiction Pop-up: Priestdaddy, First Half
We're down to the last book in our first-ever Tournament of Books nonfiction event. Today, Sarah Hepola and Andrew Womack discuss the beginning of Patricia Lockwood's memoir, Priestdaddy.
The Rooster Nonfiction Pop-up: Educated, Second Half
Our first-ever Tournament of Books nonfiction event continues. Today TMN's Rosecrans Baldwin and Sarah Hepola discuss the conclusion to Tara Westover's harrowing, inspiring Educated.
Bracketology for the 2016 Tournament of Books
Announcing the brackets for the 2016 edition of The Morning News Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes.
Paris, Exposed
The layout of the French capital is famous for its density and opaqueness. Under attack, suddenly transparency is the norm.
Dirty Words
Throwing f-bombs may be offensive to some people, but it's also one of the greatest mental health regimens ever devised.
The Writing of Art
Protesters are clashing in the street over paintings. What is it, whether in art or literature, that makes one thing better than another?
The Art and Science of Forgetting Everything
A conversation with Sarah Hepola, author of the bestselling Blackout, about investigating the worst kind of memories—those you never had.
My Letter From Oliver Sacks
Migraines, 3D magic, and an unlikely correspondence from one “incredibly stereoscopic person” to another.
What Think-Piece Writers Get Wrong About Lobotomies
The web is full of pundits looking to turn every topic into think-bait. One writer commits himself to thinking much, much deeper.
Cafe Azteca
Love of food can be love’s most sincere form—especially when avocados are involved—but also bittersweet if paired with departure.
Kafka’s Kickstarter
The latest works from the author will be given with pleasure, and received with thanks, but we need your support.
It Made Me Feel Like More Than One Person
You can learn how to read a poem, but you can’t choose how it will affect you. Here, a little cough launches a journey through a reader’s mind.
The Gambler
In which the novelist and magician Tim O’Brien makes the author disappear, and a family funeral puts a father’s sleight of hand on full display.
Editors’ Favorites From 2014
The staff choose their most-liked pieces published in 2014: a painting expedition through the Underground Railroad, a personal memory of Vivian Maier, and a restaurant review that isn’t a restaurant review.
Like Pushing an Elephant Into a Volkswagen
Writers who haven’t quit their day jobs, who cram in the writing hours around full-time work, discuss juggling office life, family, and creativity.
The Retreat
How to spend a holiday alone and not get lonely, with adventures in BBQ, books, rummage shops, and cabin porn.
Alternate Forms for Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18
The Bard’s most famous sonnet very nearly wasn’t a Shakespearean sonnet. Rejected pairings of content and form, from rondelet to an acrostic hiding his name.
Fallon and Byrne
Continuing our series where we ask novelists to write restaurant reviews that are absolutely not restaurant reviews, the author of the Southern Reach trilogy meets his match in a Dublin brie.
Radio Maria
A new series where we ask a novelist to eat in a restaurant, then write us something that meets two criteria: 1) it is a restaurant review; 2) it is not a restaurant review.
This Is How I Post
Over the past decade, social media has made us all big communicators, but we’re giving off more noise than signals. An argument for the handwritten note.
Essaying Through Life
A youthful pledge to become an essayist gets lost.
Do Not Endure Verbal, Emotional, or Physical Abuse
Offered an opportunity to help a father reach out to his young daughter, a writer agrees to assist. But the challenge isn’t as simple as grammar and commas.
Born, Still
A newborn wavers between life and something else. For the father, a walk in the woods elucidates the struggle between nature and nurture.
A Moving Experience
Travel is mostly boredom—and if you’re not bored, you’re pretty sure that everyone else is having more fun. Selected for “The Best American Travel Writing 2014,” the woes of professional travel writers.
A Few Brief Remarks
Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg was short: only three minutes long, following a moving, two-hour performance by famed orator Edward Everett. It also was nearly meaningless.
Adjusting the Picture
Some of the best TV shows these days, whether we’re watching them on television sets or online, are being compared to novels—and even sonnets. A chat with some of the leading thinkers in TV writing to find out what comes next.
Put These on My Byline
In line at the grocery store, the economics of online writing.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Wed
To wed or not to wed? There’s the rub. Revisiting Tom Stoppard’s classic in the era of gay marriage.
Giving Up the Guns
When your life is opened in front of you, all your old attachments shucked off, the task of finding a new ending can be as simple as handing over a bag of guns.
Joan Wickersham
Our man in Boston sits down for an extended chat with author Joan Wickersham about her new story collection, lurking near architects, the wisdom of good editors, how to profit from artist colonies, and the benefits of avoiding the MFA trap.
Words Fail
This is the essay for your community college poetry class, the essay that encapsulates your thoughts on the assigned work in written form, the essay you started this morning, the essay that is due today.
Habitat for Humanity
Manhattan is rife with lumberjacks, Los Angeles is hot for Appalachia, and the latest trend in pornography is cabins. Yes, cabins. But when a woman leaves New York for a log structure of her own, a metamorphosis occurs.
MarketStrong
After resigning in disgrace from the charity he helped found and losing his sponsorship with Nike, Lance Armstrong now must cope with the leak of his new memoir—excerpted here.
Dear Literary Magazine
Every day, rejections from lit mags flood the inboxes of thousands of writers the world over. Today, one writer changes all that.
Ron Rash, Redux
Our man in Boston talks with writer Ron Rash about his latest book, America's great regional voices, the high percentage of readers in New Zealand and Australia, and the misery that accompanies putting a novel together, where it's rather more fun to stick pencils in your eyes.
Down and Out in a Repurposed Troop Carrier
Stunt memoirs are ubiquitous: writers who eat, pray, and love straight into their bank accounts. But what happens when the material for your book—for which you took a dozen amusement park jobs to acquire—isn’t all hijinks and zany locals? What if it’s rather nice?
Go Away
Artist colonies are mysterious places. Available only to a select few, supposedly teeming with alcohol, affairs, and creative hoodoo. But the rumors aren't true—they just lack detail. Scenes and lessons from three residencies.
Jonestown, Naipaul, and Me
A boy asking for money. An editor yelling at him to go away. An author, a rising star, dying young from a heart attack. A group of followers ending their lives at the wish of a single man.
Nobody Says I Love You Anymore
I’ve spent my life complaining and arguing and telling stories about the city I came from. Then I changed—but it did, too.
H.P. Lovecraft, Author, Is Dead
Today marks the 75th anniversary of H.P. Lovecraft's death. From Stephen King's It to “The Call of Cthulhu,” a survey of the 20th century's greatest horror writer's afterlife of influence.
Diary of a Post-Adrenaline Junkie
Some decisions are best made heedlessly, based on the chance for an epic story—and some people think like that all the time. A report on what it’s like to slide down a volcano on a piece of sheet metal at 55 mph.
Sven Birkerts
Our Man in Boston sits down for this third conversation with author, critic, and book-world majordomo Sven Birkerts to talk about the current reviewing situation, the best books of 2000, and Amy Winehouse.
Address Unknown
In New York’s St. John the Divine Cathedral, a letter to a dead man, tucked under a plaque near his ashes, offers the first and only clue in a mystery about faith.
This Is Not a George Plimpton Interview
Every artist deals with critics differently—Richard Ford spitting on Colson Whitehead, for example. But the rule is to avoid direct contact. Not for John Warner, debut novelist, who decided to seek out the man behind his worst review.
The Procreant Urge
Ted Williams’s last game for the Red Sox was almost a flop. But it provided fuel for one of the best sports essays of all time—until the author started tinkering. On baseball, “The Simpsons,” and the creative impulse to never stop.
Picture Me Not Posting
If distractions poison a writer’s ambitions, then surely a summer with no internet access is the antidote?
Tempest in an Inkpot
Don’t be fooled by the hand-lettering trend in movie posters and book covers—cursive is dead. Who cares? A million angry commenters around the web who extol the virtues of loops and curls. But the traditional form has a history that’s less than precious.
Jim Shepard
Our man in Boston and Jim Shepard, the author most recently of You Think That's Bad, discuss whacko projects, researching short stories by jet, and how much gold it takes for a writer to dump Knopf's Gary Fisketjon.
Caught Telling Fiction
The gap between literary and historical fiction is mostly a marketing ploy--at least until a novelist meets a survivor of her story's plot.
A Conversation With Philip Graham
As lightbulbs are to the moon, first stories are to finished books. John Warmer chats with the writer Philip Graham, his former professor, about finding topics, developing mentors, and reaching readers.
By Any Other Name
Writer seeks pen name: something simple, nothing dippy, and preferably one that avoids implying a lawyer who savors puns.
Beer and Loathing
For agents and publishers, the Frankfurt Book Fair is publishing's biggest event: part conclave, mostly marathon, and all business. It is absolutely no place for an aspiring author, as we discover.
Annie Dillard and the Writing Life
Writers aren’t born, they’re made—from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine. And sometimes tutelage.
You Are Not Cool
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is known for writing colorful decisions, full of “gobbledegook” and even John Lennon quotes. But whatever his legal philosophy, one thing he isn’t is cool.
I Dream in Malcolm Gladwell
A new sport is taking hold, one that involves marshmallows, sticks, and fire.
A Writer by Any Other Name
Describing a character over 300 pages is one thing--reducing yourself to three lines is another. One man struggles with a writer's greatest challenge: the byline.
Gift Subscriptions
A gift in the mail is a joy to open--a gift every month (or less) trumps that. For those stumped on how to tie up their holiday shopping, our resident shopping expert advises you to pour yourself some ’nog, and order a few magazines.
Hail Ira
Rosemary's Baby author Ira Levin died this week--and it wasn't a lousy book review that killed him.
Web Noir
When writing for online magazines, crime doesn't always pay--but it can earn you a fashionable T-shirt. Investigating the current era of crime fiction on the web and the magazines that are making new voices heard.
J.P. Donleavy at Levington Park
Home is where writers often retreat to focus on work, not receive visitors. Here's the author of The Ginger Man at his Irish estate. Lock your doors, Salinger.
Stephen Wright's Literary Landscape
UFO freaks, plant-loving vets, and science-minded slave owners people Stephen Wright's novels. Maybe a little off the wall? Maybe not. We talk with the writer about his books and their reflections of the human condition.
Some of This Is Made Up
Sharing your name with a celebrity can be frustrating, especially when the two of you pursue the same occupation.
Foolish Chances With Words
Laptops make writing easy to produce, and easy to erase. At least with typewriters you’re creating something that, however terrible, lives in the world.
A Course Guide to Literary Readings
These days, literary readings aren’t as boring as they should be. But what for the budding author or poet, still in school, who doesn’t know how to smash a guitar or bake a cobbler onstage?
Charles Baxter
The author covers topics such as his new book, Saul and Patsy, Chekhov's medical career, politics, Minnesota, and what it's like to have your work made into film.
Accidental Strength
Princeton graduate Ung Lee wins prestige, cash, and a number of prizes for his fiction thesis. The hitch is, one of the stories was stolen. The author whose work was robbed responds.
Joe Mitchell's Secret
Considered the best profile writer New York's ever seen, Joseph Mitchell's influence is unfortunately on the wane. Why today's prose-makers have lost their way.
A Few of a Million Postcards
You're traveling and your laptop's at home; how the hell do you share how much fun you're having? Our writer lays out a few simple postcard templates for the rest of us to follow.