All Content
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Fiction, Essays & MoreWhy Fiction Matters
The Drip Drip Drip of Another Consciousness
Jane Smiley
Last night, I dreamed about my novel Ten Days In the Hills, not one of my best received, but certainly one that I enjoyed writing.
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Fiction, Essays & More
Great Fiction is a Force for Peace
Roxana Robinson
An archaeologist friend told me recently about the discovery of an oral tradition stretching back for 10,000 years. They were stories told by...
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Fiction, Essays & More
First Fiction
Alexander Chee
There is an exercise I have my students do, one I invented. Think of a story your family tells about you to any newcomer, usually from your early childhood.
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Fiction, Essays & MoreWhy Fiction Matters
The Story of My Life (and Yours)
Tiphanie Yanique
At the New School, where I am a professor, I teach a literature seminar called Girls: Narratives of the Girl Child. Every text we read features a girl.
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Fiction, Essays & More
The Invention of the Self Is Another Kind of Fiction
Krys Lee
Once there was a child who hid from her father. She imagined him with blades for hands, she saw herself as strung on a leash that he owned.
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Videos
Why We Read: Mary Gaitskill
Mary Gaitskill is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To (nominated for...
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Videos
Why We Read: E. L. Doctorow
E. L. Doctorow’s works of fiction include Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, the Book of...
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VideosWhy We Read
Why We Read: Francine Prose
Francine Prose is the author of twenty-one works of fiction, including Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers...
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Fiction, Essays & MoreWhy Fiction Matters
Escaping the Prison of Realism
Darryl Pinckney
I was surprised in Elizabeth Hardwick’s writing class at Barnard when she told us that the mystery of Jay Gatsby was that he was Jewish.
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Fiction, Essays & More
What Was It You Wanted?
Tom Piazza
I like spending time with the writers I like. I don’t like reading authors I don’t like.
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Fiction, Essays & More
On Mind & Meaning
Dexter Palmer
The pattern of my conversation with strangers at parties changed in two ways after I published a novel. The first, and the less common of the...
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Fiction, Essays & More
That's My Story and I'm (Probabilistically) Sticking to It
Liam Durcan
The man kept on talking and talking, telling me about the cat that was brushing up against his right thigh at that very moment
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Fiction, Essays & More
The Science of Magical Thinking
Kristopher Jansma
Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel, Midnight’s Children, is born at exactly midnight on the 15th of August...
