-- Reading Gabriel García Márquez’s morbidity in the happiest country on earth. Proud to have edited Nina Martyris' lovely, striking essay in Guernica. (That's Gabo's childhood home in Cartegena, Colombia, pictured above. Photo by Lakshmi Govindrajan Javeri.) -- Alan Turing's reading list: here are the books he borrowed from his school library. -- "The Dreams of Italo Calvino." -- Love this: The Seattle Public Library launches a Books on Bikes program. -- The fascinating friendship between Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, brought to us by Michelle Dean in The New Yorker. -- Bulgakov's ghost and the haunting of Russia. --... Continue reading

"You asked me about my voluntary solitude. If you will notice my movement from one institution to another in the South, different sites in the region — from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, northward to Lexington, Kentucky, then east to Charlottesville, Virginia, and, finally, back to the Deep South (or what some people here attempt to call it, “the Southwest,”) to College Station, Texas, each of which is “an out of the way” place. Within each of these contexts, I have found myself alone, without a group of people as friends on whom I could depend for different social and intellectual needs.... Continue reading

I'm so excited to invite you to a major event Literary Detroit is hosting on June 19 at Signal-Return in Detroit's Eastern Market. Bringing improv comedy and poetry together, this is going to be an uncommon, hilarious, creative, and interactive evening -- and, in featuring the terrific writer Matthew Olzmann (along with Jennifer Chang), it cuts right at the heart of what we're doing with Lit-Detroit: cultivating a distinctive and extraordinary literary culture in one of the world's most fascinating cities. We're proud to partner with the fantastic Signal-Return letterpress: a tremendous force in Detroit's creative community. Please join us.... Continue reading

Real tears upon reading the last pages of Persuasion this afternoon. I have thoughts swimming about the book -- its narrative of sorrow and regret, its needling with the unsteady idea of persuasion, its keen eye on manners as power, its hilarious rendering of passive-selfishness (as opposed to passive-aggressiveness), its accounting of knowing people at their core (homes), its complicated ideas about happiness.... And, why Jane Austen is a rarity in being an author who, once I pick up one of her novels, I do not so much as glance at the other enticing reads on my bedstand. I take... Continue reading

Let me be sure to not bury the lede: This book is a lit fire. I'm adventurous with my reading. I'm all over the genre map, and I have particular gusto for those whose life's work twine nonfiction and fiction. James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Fyodor Dostoevsky, David Foster Wallace, Charles Baudelaire, Jorge Luis Borges, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Mary McCarthy: for better and worse, they give me a model for the kind of hybridic literary life I want to live. But I hadn't gotten around to reading one of the most notorious among the tribe for a simple reason: Norman... Continue reading

Let me first make the disclaimer that I know great people who work with HuffPo, who have done really good work there. I've even celebrated some of that work in print over at the Columbia Journalism Review. Nonetheless, let me break down the reasons behind my five-years-plus boycott of the site as both a reader and writer. 1. They make an enormous profit off of unpaid writers, as was revealed when AOL bought them in 2011. (Yes, some people at HuffPo are paid, but the bulk of their content doesn't come from them.) For a profitable company to standardize this... Continue reading

If you asked me what my daily writing routine was, I'd be hard pressed to tell you. There are patterns, familiar loops I run through, but hardly an everyday schedule. Sometimes I'm writing first thing in the morning; other times I'm running off to teach or interview. Sometimes I drink coffee; other times tea. Sometimes I set up shop at a cafe, other times on my little porch, or desk, or at a self-manufactured standing table, or corner of a couch, or the floor. I like the variation, adapting to my moods and what presses on my workday. And yet,... Continue reading

My new story at the Columbia Journalism Review had a bit of breaking news: Two years ago, with statehouse bureaus taking huge cuts in a contracting media landscape, National Public Radio designed the StateImpact project to fill the reporting void while experimenting with a new model of local-national public media collaboration. It works like this: NPR member stations joined forces to report on a significant policy issue in their state. Florida, Indiana, and Ohio cover education; Pennsylvania and Texas took on energy and the environment; and Idaho, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma each report on the economy. There are at least... Continue reading

"A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad, undisciplined character. Now a man may be evil, but I believe that people can be evil in their essential natures and still have good characters. Good in the sense of being well-tuned. They can have characters that are flexible, supple, adaptable, principled in relation to their own good or their own evil—even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy, either.... Continue reading

-- George Packer writes about Depression literature and journalism, comparing the 1930s to our era now. Above, an unemployment line in Kansas City -- the kind of jarring manifestation of hard times that is less present in our public space these days, despite similar economic hardship; Packer discusses how this influences the different ways we're telling stories now. Appalachia, Detroit, Edmund Wilson, James Agee, and Occupy all discussed in the piece. The article is behind a New Yorker subscription wall, but if you can access it, it's a must read. Locals, ask me if you want to borrow my print... Continue reading

At Ms. Magazine, via Daily Mail. Mary Thom is at far right. I am so sad to hear that Mary Thom died unexpectedly last night in a motorcycle accident. She was 68. At once fierce and gracious, a smart and true-hearted light, Thom was a founding editor of Ms. Magazine and was with the publication through 1991; she also wrote the book about that revolutionary magazine, and co-authored a book about Bella Abzug. More recently, she was editor-in-chief of the Women's Media Center, which is where I had the privilege of working with her on a few stories on, for... Continue reading

Capping an extraordinary week in Boston, I wrote a piece for The American Prospect that walked through the extraordinary coverage of The Boston Globe, whose team pivoted in seconds from reporting on a celebratory local event to reporting on a terrible and ambiguous crisis. It was a portentious time for the Globe's worth to emerge: the newspaper is up for sale and last week, initial bids were due. An excerpt from my story: The Globe’s journalism this week is a reminder, as we talk about the evolution of media, that the best resources in local media are good reporters who... Continue reading

In Guernica, I have an essay about Muriel Rukeyser's lost novel and the recovery of work by women writers. I also spend some time with the fascinating story of the People's Olympiad, set up in Barcelona in 1936 as a protest to the Berlin Olympics hosted by Adolf Hitler. Six thousand athletes from twenty-two nations, including the United States and United Kingdom, signed on. But two days before it was set to begin, Spain's civil war broke out. And that brings us back to Rukeyser: she was there. She wrote a novel about it called Savage Coast. But that book... Continue reading

On the steps of the Boston Public Library looking out at Copley Square. Half-a-mile from my old home, and right around the corner of the Boston Marathon finish line. When I lived in Boston, I spent every Marathon Monday hanging around Copley, struck by the crackling emotion, power, and vulnerability alive at the finish line. A rare and gorgeous community emerged each year, so real you could practically put your hand upon it. That it has been split open today makes my knees week in sorrow. The familiarity of this ground, as this brutal story unspools in even international papers,... Continue reading

A rainy summer day at the office One of the very first freelance article assignments I got was to write a short piece about literary blogs for Poets & Writers magazine. This was in the winter of 2004, and I'd only just discovered lit blogs: those smart and incisive spaces that brought forth a passionate new way of engaging with books. I read them while drinking tea, and with that curling kind of excitement in my belly. Pitching the article was an excuse to dig deeper. The editor gave me a yes, on spec. As I was a newbie journalist... Continue reading

... and it's making us all kind of new friends. Come on over and welcome us to the digital neighborhood! Check out "Reading Detroit," our semi-comprehensive list of books from and about this fascinating city. Look for on-the-ground ways to connect at our calendar of literary events. Maybe you are so enthused by our work to elevate the literary culture of Detroit, you will want to join us or throw a few dollars our way: we encourage both kinds of support! And don't forget to come by our debut event: a ridiculously fun book swap that will be the first... Continue reading

Years ago, I realized how powerful it is to know that there are places in the world where I have lived and loved and explored, and to name them as homes. Some homes I created for myself out of sheer force of will. Upon returning to them, even after long absences, trees sing to me. Rivers speak as narrators. Stories tumble down like snow from the windowsills, dusting my shoulders. I wrote a bit about this feeling when I visited Boston in March and sensed "that personal combustion and creation spilling in the streets like an ink stain, marking me... Continue reading

What a bizarre book this is. My old paperback copy advertises the precursor to telephone area codes on its title page ("Starting on December 16, a distinguishing numeral will be added to, and become part of, each central office name in New York City. For example: HAnover will become HAnover 2.)" The typeset on the yellow pages was sometimes turned askew, or absent. You might think the material of the book would put me more in a mind to embrace John O'Hara's classic novel-of-its-time ("Great Novel of the Fantastic Thirties!" exclaims the text on my copy. "Shrew, savage, merciless!" goes... Continue reading

Literati Bookstore, at the corner of Washington and Fourth, is open for business. Readers rejoice. The new bookshop writes about its ongoing state of emergence at its blog: Second, we have a suggestion list in our store for customer recommendations! Please be patient with our growing inventory. If there’s not something you think we should have, say so! We are only as good of a bookstore as our ability to give our community what it wants. We left room in our inventory to grow, learn what Ann Arbor wants, what it wants to buy, and give a few suggestions of... Continue reading

Not much time left to fill out my easy and brief reader survey, celebrating Isak's seventh birthday. I count on this feedback from you -- both new readers and longtimers -- to guide me, hold me accountable, and, frankly, hearten me. Plus, I'm giving out free books to three lucky participants in the survey. (See which ones here.) So let me know what you think already! And then let's do a dramatic slow-motion group high-five. Continue reading

Signs By Larry Levis All night I dreamed of my home, of the roads that are so long and straight they die in the middle— among the spines of elderly weeds on either side, among the dead cats, the ants who are all eyes, the suitcase thrown open, sprouting failures. 2. And this evening in the garden I find the winter inside a snail shell, rigid and cool, a little stubborn temple, its one visitor gone. 3. If there were messages or signs, I might hear now a voice tell me to walk forever, to ask the mold for pardon,... Continue reading

In The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the author and wearer of many other hats laid out his ideal rhythm for the day. Continue reading

-- Breakfast at Tiffany's, the weird and wonderful Truman Capote novella that was (heavily) adapted into the famed Audrey Hepburn film, is opening as a Broadway play. On WBUR's "On Point," Tom Ashbrook revisits the classic with the director and two culture writers, questioning what has given the story "such staying power, such magnetism." -- "Capote's Co-conspirators." Via The New Yorker. -- The letters of Willa Cather were once banned. Next month, all will be revealed. -- Stephen King and his wife Tabitha pledge $3 million to their local library in Bangor, Maine. -- "In the Kingdom of the First... Continue reading

I found out that Chinua Achebe died, a writer and thinker that made a real imprint on my heart, just moments before I found out that John died -- the man who was a grandfather to me my whole life, who salted his beer and cheered for Notre Dame, and who I dearly love. I'm feeling all kinds of things right now, not all of which I feel like articulating just yet. But as I reflect on loss and change, the different textures of it, I thought I might offer a toast to Achebe by turning to the essay I... Continue reading

As Isak nears its sweet seventh anniversary(!), it's time for the Isak Reader Survey -- a crucial and joyful way to hear back from you. Whether you've been here since the beginning, or just discovered this space an hour ago, I want to know what you think! As always, and in the spirit of transparency, your feedback will be integrated into the public sharing that is the Isak birthday post/annual report. Please fill out this easy and brief survey ... and, as a sign of my gratitude for your candidness, this year I'm giving out three book prizes. I'll use... Continue reading