Activity

Jill met me at the airport. She was wearing white shorts and a pale pink blouse, her face was bare and her hair was spiky, and the first thing she said was “Recognize me without my glad rags?” I did, of course; whatever she wore, she was unmistakable. I want to explain why, and won’t be able to, bu…

Well, where else were we hosties going to go when we got too old, too tired, when our voices gave out from all those smoky flights? When we’d spent years in the air, crossing the Pacific, crossing the Nullarbor, half imagining, because time seems to slow during plane travel, that the years weren’t …

When you’re writing, you are always thinking of the reader, but that reader ultimately has to be yourself. If you discover, Wait, this sentence isn’t quite right, that’s the reader in you, the part of you whose taste has been shaped by hundreds of great works of literature, speaking up. A writer …

I always felt that writing short stories was more of a job. I could complete them on a schedule—they were inevitably finished within a day, or a few. Novels are impossible to execute that way. Over the years that you work, your sense of the book shifts. You deepen your understanding of your charact…

the unreasonable teenage belief that he should not be interpellated, which Emma had to google to learn that he felt he should not be collected into a humanlike image by the rods and cones of others.