Memories of the Future
Siri Hustvedt
"Years ago I left the wide, flat fields of rural Minnesota for the island of Manhattan to find the hero of my first novel. When I arrived in August of 1978, he was not a character so much as a rhythmic possibility, an embryonic creature of my imagination, which I felt as a series of metrical beats that quickened and slowed with my steps as I navigated the streets of the city. I think I was hoping to discover myself in him, to prove that he and I were worthy of whatever story came our way. I wasn’t looking for happiness or comfort in New York City. I was looking for adventure, and I knew the adventurer must suffer before he arrives home after countless trials on land and sea or is finally snuffed out by the gods. I didn’t know then what I know now: As I wrote, I was also being written. The book had been started long before I left the plains. Multiple drafts of a mystery had already been inscribed in my brain, but that didn’t mean I knew how it would turn out. My unformed hero and I were headed for a place that was little more than a gleaming fiction: the future."
Literary Allusion Runs Deep Through the History of Hip-Hop
Roy Christopher on the Intersection of Books and Beats
Meet the Man Brought to Trial for Murdering the English Language
(In the Press, by a Jury of His Enemies)
Money, Guilt, and Returning to Hong Kong to Care for My Mother
Xu Xi on the Changing Attitudes to Filial Piety
The British Schoolboy Memoir: Masking Misery with Nostalgia
James Brooke-Smith Considers a Miserable Genre
The People Writer-Parents Need (Besides Their Kids)
Brian Gresko and Polly Rosenwaike Talk Writing and Parenting
Oksana, Behave!
Maria Kuznetsova
"Papa had been the USSR Math Olympics champion when he was sixteen, but all he’d managed to achieve was working for Goldman Sachs. He had competed all over the Soviet Union, from Tallinn to Vladivostok, and had even gotten to shake Brezhnev’s hand in a big ceremony when he won. But nobody cared about the Math Olympics in America. Mama loved to remind me of all of Papa’s sacrifices for our family and told me to go easy on him, especially when he did things that were “good for his soul,” like blasting classical music in his car as loud as humanly possible without caring about his passengers—namely, me. That morning, I massaged my temples, hoping Papa would get the picture, amazed that even classical music could be offensive at a high volume."
Read a Previously Unpublished Letter from Zora Neale Hurston
Writing Novels, Reporting on Murders, Curating Folk Concerts... She Could Do It All
James Joyce’s Dublin, a Microcosm of the World
The Streets in Ulysses Are the Streets of the Everyman
Why Salt Lake City is a Great Place for a Writer to Live
Artist Collectives, Festivals, and a Honest-to-Goodness Subculture
The Time I Crashed at Nora Ephron’s Apartment
Michael Mewshaw Recalls the Literary Jetset of the 1980s
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