Perfect sentences and slang that tickles your mind! A new book of writing advice says a good sentence “imposes a logic on the world’s weirdness” and pares away options for meaning, word by word. • Your musician friend may refer to...
Shaun Usher has collected many marvelous epistles in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (Bookshop|Amazon). One of them, from E. B. White, is a thoughtful letter of encouragement urging the reader to “wind the clock...
Reading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (Bookshop|Amazon) feels like auditing a class with creative writing professor writer George Saunders, author of the acclaimed Lincoln in...
According to Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, it’s important to master the basics of writing, but there comes a time when you have to strike out on your own and teach yourself. Also: Spanish idioms involving food, a conversation about the...
In his essay “The Art of Dying,” art critic Peter Schjeldahl reflects on the process of writing: When I finish something and it seems good, I’m dazed. It must have been fun to write. I wish I’d been there. This is part of a complete...
Author Nick Hornby is an ardent fan of both the novelist Charles Dickens and the musician Prince. In Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius (Bookshop|Amazon), Hornby shows that those two very different men actually had a lot in common...