Nonfiction

"You got all Scottish back there," says my brother, Marco, smirking as our taxi rumbles away. It's July 2010, and we're outside our family home in Edinburgh, fresh off the plane from two weeks in Canada - and though I try to brush off his comment I know exactly what he means.

When I was fifteen, I received a dictionary anonymously in the mail.

I was 20 when I visited Lithuania almost a decade ago, for the first and only time. There are lots of good reasons to remember the trip: the picturesque countryside, the fascinating historic sites, and where I stayed in an old, crumbling apartment building across from the Finnish embassy, whose 24-hour guard stared suspiciously whenever I came and went. Instead, though, what I remember best is a single pint of hefeweizen.

People often meet their future spouses at grad school, but when I moved to Boston for a master's program I had the express goal of avoiding any serious relationship. I was there for a degree in fiction, I told myself. To get better at writing stories, and nothing else.

A profile of the author Andre Dubus III.

Compared to other creative industries, people in theatre are very secretive about their sales figures. More openness will create more opportunities for everyone — but particularly small and independent players trying to break in for the first time.

Audience surveys by Indigo, SOLT and YouGov couldn't be clearer - if theatres want audiences to return, they will need social distancing in place.

Now that you can buy anything online with just a few clicks, why is booking tickets still so difficult?

The film world is keen on releasing a director's cut, which differs from the final version of the movie; publishers should do the same with books.

Solange, whose sister, Beyonce Knowles, is married to Jay Z, attacked the latter in an elevator last week as all three of them were leaving a swanky party in Manhattan. Leaked video of the altercation soon prompted a storm of speculation, both online and in print. What could have provoked Solange to lash out like that? Whither such vitriol? We'll likely never know the answer - but amongst all our feverish attempts to uncover the truth this past week, there's a lot we can learn about writing good fiction.

In general, I dislike curmudgeonly fiats contra adverb. However, there are a couple of cases where I think specific adverbs ought to be banned outright. One of those is the book review phrase "deeply felt."

Santa's not the only one who makes lists in December: come the end of the year, anyone who's ever expressed a passing literary opinion has their own rundown of the year's best books.

When Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was published, in 2010, the British Daily Telegraph called it "the first great American novel of the post-Obama era." If that sounds oddly specific (not to mention premature), they at least had good reason for it: the title of "first great American novel of the 21st century" had already been awarded to Franzen's earlier novel, The Corrections, by Elle magazine.

If you happened to read more than one review of J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy last month, you'll never look at a condom the same way again.

The "quiet novel", the quagmire of literary publishing.

The prejudice against adjectives is a stupid one, an arbitrary holdover from Strunk and White, and it's all the more infuriating because reviewers flaunt it all the time - particularly when it comes to the word "debut." Rarely does this word appear without one - or more! - adjectives crammed in front of it, and worse, the ones that crop up the most have now taken on weird, book-review-specific meanings of their own.

Book reviewers' relationship with the word "funny' is, well — a little funny.

We live in an age of outrage, yet one of our most egregious 'blood sports' escapes censure from the press. Since long before Hemingway, writers have been calling bullfighting exotic instead of barbaric -- what are they thinking?

I think a lot of book reviewers were smacked as children. Some of them must have at least been bullied. How else to explain their admiration for the ability not to flinch?

"I don't know" is hardly an uncommon thing to say, but recently this phrase has started hanging out with an ugly new friend: "I'm too lazy too look it up."

A review of Derek Palacio's novel How to Shake the Other Man.

A review of Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop's novel The Why of Things.

A review of Josh Hanagarne's The World's Strongest Librarian.

A review of Francesco Pacifico's novel The Story of My Purity.

A review of Fraser Nixon's novel The Man Who Killed.

A review of Mary Gabriel's Love and Capital.

A review of Drew Magary's novel The Postmortal.

A review of Jay Neugeboren's collection of stories, You Are My Heart.

A review of John Pollack's The Pun Also Rises.

A review of Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People.

You think you’re busy? Meet Galileo, Darwin, and Marx, who fathered schools of thought in between fathering children.