Carl Sagan may have passed away almost twenty years ago, but he continues to influence minds of all generations through intellectual heirs like Neil DeGrasse Tyson (host of the remake of Sagan's beloved 1980 TV series Cosmos) as well as through the books he wrote in his lifetime.
Who would disagree that reading great fiction helps us define and understand our experience and historic times? A lot has been noted in the past few years about the similarity of our current moment…
We’ve had a lot of fun---and some debate---lately with reading lists from people like Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and even Marilyn Monroe (via her library). And we’ve featured undergraduate syllabi from the teaching days of David Foster Wallace and W.H. Auden.
In the wake of ongoing discussions about whether we can love monstrous writers, or whether we should even write monstrous characters, I have escaped into a personal library not of monsters, but of …
Grief is one of those experiences that seems like a black-out to me. To comprehend the magnitude of what death really means—that concept of forever—is so challenging on an intellectual level that p…
I finished my MFA in 2018. I’m pretty excited about that accomplishment, but one side-effect has made me sad. As a result of being required to read ten books a month for two years, I’ve struggled to…
From a new collection of more than 1 million college syllabi.
Their work is an essential part of our daily lives—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—but their voices don’t usually get a seat at our tables.
A living anatomy of influences, from Brontë to Baldwin.
It does seem possible, I think, to overvalue the significance of a writer’s library to his or her own literary productions. We all hold on to books that have long since ceased to have any pull on us, and lose track of books that have greatly influenced us.
I was given the task of curating, yeah it’s that fancy, a reading list of books that portray black men in contemporary America in complex and nuanced ways — seeing as to how the majority of books being published are still overwhelmingly about white folks. I’d like to believe that my collection, How Are You Going to […]
I am nostalgic for the bygone office life, for that first real job in our twenties when the word “colleague” encompassed both friend and coworker, when work meant hanging out with them during the d…
There’s a reason that people hide their diaries: they’re private conversations with close, and silent confidants. That’s also the reason people want to read them. No self-respecting teenager who di…
When reading about mothers and daughters, we might feel grateful we didn’t have to endure such conflict and trauma. We might long for what we, ourselves, never had. But then again, we might feel se…
Describing conditions characteristic of life in the early 21st century, future historians may well point to such epidemic viral illnesses as SARS, MERS, and the now-rampaging COVID-19. But those focused on culture will also have their pick of much more benign recurring phenomena to explain: topical book lists, for instance, which crop up in the 21st-century press at the faintest prompting by current events.
With the holidays upon us, tables across America and the world will be heaving with delights. Your Thanksgiving banquet and company might hit the commercially-sanctioned “happy” mark. However, if you’re less than enthusiastic about the season of forced gratitude and have all kinds of feelings about its settler colonialism origins, we have suggest (naturally!) literary […]
This time of year, I always get the back-to-school blues. Not, mind you, because I have to go back to school, but because other people get to, and I have to keep on being an employed adult, at leas…
What if… Marvel comics were being anthologized by Penguin Classics? Wonder no further, for that day is here! This morning, the publisher announced their new series, the Penguin Classics Marve…
One of the first questions readers ask me about my novel, Burnt Sugar, is whether I drew from my own experience to write it. This sometimes troubles me, primarily because I find that writing by wom…
At any given moment many of us can recommend a list of books to read.
Recently, Tillman Miller went to the 25th Havana International Book Fair to investigate Cuba’s moment in contemporary literature. What followed was an oral history of Cuban literature, one wh…
Some famous thinkers make gifted elucidators when they step behind the lectern; others are more like nutty professors.
“‘Stop!’ cried the groaning old man at last, ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.’” –Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans * Most of what I’ve learned in life I got out of novels. Th…
To propose a class titled The Literature of Obsession is nearly as broad a topic as proposing a class simply titled: literature. There is an argument that every novel is a novel of obsession, or at…
Last week we asked booksellers across the country what titles they were excited about this fall. Though it pains us to say, five years from now, a lot of books from that list will have been forgott…
A few years ago, my older brother got married. In the weeks preceding the happy occasion, a sad, stubborn feeling crept over me, which I can only describe as a kind of mourning. This troubled me: I…
My earliest awareness of the Midwest as a region—and myself as a Midwesterner—came from reading novels by male writers. I spent much of my early adulthood immersed in the mute physicality of Heming…
Fight the power: a starter reading list for the young black feminist.
I am a writer. I am a mother. I am a writer who has written extensively on motherhood, starting fitfully when my daughter was six months old, for several years, culminating in the publication of a…
If every news cycle in your country leaves you aghast, an invented or reimagined nation can be alluring. These are the ones I kept in mind while writing my own.
From the pulpiest beach book to literature’s loftiest heights, dysfunctional families are the heart, soul and voice of fiction. Belonging to a perfectly happy clan must be bliss. The traditions! Th…
Writers are preoccupied with memory. They have to be: a story is, at its most fundamental level, a sequence of memories. You can’t have a plot without memory. Endings need a middle. A middle has to…
Writing is silence—writing is isolation. Isolation is not a medium for literature, nor is it a method of creating literature; it is the very substance of literature itself.
Need a book suggestion for the weekend? Take a look at what our authors have been reading.
This list focuses on the best cozy mystery series with two or more published books available, featuring authors like Agatha Christie and Ovidia Yu.
Over the past two decades, I’ve worked on fiction between the spaces of my various law related jobs. Law firm associate. Federal judicial clerk. Law professor (which, happily, I still am). My debut…
My novel The Prettiest Star, set in 1986, asks what happens when a gay, HIV+ man goes back to the small town where he grew up. I wanted to write a story that shines a light on an overlooked part of…
The nights are drawing in, Netflix is featuring its creepiest shows, and Halloween in all of its gothic glory is very nearly upon us. While the gothic tradition has more than its fair share of…
I was a high school cheerleader. Fridays we wore our uniforms to school. I’d walk down the hall, short skirt flapping, long ponytail flagging, and turn my head to watch the girl who walked opposite…
Image by David Shankbone Michael Stipe’s tenure as frontman and lyricist for R.E.M. certainly revealed a literate mind. A former art major at the University of Georgia and current art teacher at NYU, his best lyrics scan well as poetry. One can imagine being invited over for a dinner party to Mr.
Where do reading lists come from, anyway? Wouldn’t we love to know exactly what Plato’s students were required to read? In Aristotle and other ancient writers we have tantalizing glimpses of works …
The literature that arose from the 1918-19 influenza pandemic speaks to our current moment in profound ways.
Most literary conversations I’ve had about narrators in novels are about which point of view works best: 1st person (narrator is a character), 2nd person (you are the character and narrator), or 3r…
Meaningful roles dry up in Hollywood for women over 30, but for those over 80 it’s a wasteland. At best there is one of two grandmas: kindly or batshit. The same double-bind could be said for older women in literature, who arguably represent one of the most underwritten aspects of female experience. Even when they […]
This year, we published stories that enlightened, moved and excited us. The BBC Future team share their personal favourites.
When I’m deep inside a writing project I have no time to read for pleasure. All my reading is about shoveling in fuel to power the work in progress. With Insomnia I decided to let my gut lead the way, which is how I came to end up feeding (at first, largely unconsciously) a psychic […]
If Black Friday did not exist, Thomas Pynchon would invent it. Black Friday is the High Mass of American Consumerism: an annual ritual of crowds feasting on the promise of deals after they have fea…
