Founding the First English-Language Library in Gaza
In Gaza, repairing a destroyed house can take several weeks or months. Rebuilding a whole house can take years. That’s because Gaza is under siege, and...
Kate Eichhorn on the Rise of Insta-Artists and Insta-Poets
In April 2014, Amalia Ulman, a recent art school graduate living in Los Angeles, started to upload images of herself to Instagram. Her first image, accompanied...
5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week
Our F5 tornado of terrific reviews this week includes A. O. Scott on Werner Herzog’s The Twilight World, Brendan O’Connor on Jarrod Shanahan’s Captives,...
Looking to Songs and Sermons to Structure a Memoir About Fighting for Black Lives
The adage to “write what you know” could be a meta-principle. We know it applies to the content of our writing: that we use our lived experience as a well...
How Sports Profoundly Shape Us, Even After We Quit
Several times a week, I pick up my hurley and sliotar—a stick and a ball—and go to the large blank wall on the road behind my house. For ten minutes, I hit...
My Father Is a Civil Rights Hero. Growing Up with Him Was Complicated.
There’s a video of James Baldwin interviewing a stranger with my daddy’s face that will one day be my face. The VHS tape of this interview has been in my...
Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance
Six weeks later, you were dead. I’m sorry if that seems sudden to you, but that’s what it felt like to me. That’s what it still feels like even now,...
Don’t read for empathy, read so you can bring your sheep to school.
Heartwarming, hyper-local news reports about kids and books are definitely my beat—and reader, this is the one: KCCI Des Moines is reporting that an...
When Artists and Athletes Age, What Happens to Their Work?
Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary...
