Writing and Writers

Will Substack Go Beyond Newsletters? A Company Weighs Its Future.

There are things that the newsletter writer Kirsten Han misses about Substack. They just aren’t enough to outweigh the downsides. She disliked how the platform portrayed itself as a haven for independent writers with fewer resources while offering six-figure advances to several prominent white men. The hands-off content moderation policy, which allowed transphobic and anti-vaccine […]

How Jonathan Larson Taught Me to Become a Better Critic

I watched “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” Netflix’s film adaptation of the Jonathan Larson musical, four and a half times in the span of three weeks. I’ve listened to the soundtrack three times, with the exception of the opening song, “30/90.” That I’ve listened to at least a dozen times. When you replay a song that […]

Black Authors Shake Up Brazil’s Literary Scene

RIO DE JANEIRO — Itamar Vieira Júnior, whose day job working for the Brazilian government on land reform took him deep into the impoverished countryside, knew next to nothing about the mainstream publishing industry when he put the final touches on a novel he had been writing on and off for decades. On a whim, […]

An 8-Year-Old Wrote a Book and Hid It on a Library Shelf. It’s a Hit.

For example, in “Chaptr 1,” Dillon writes, “ONe Day in wintr it wus Crismis!” In his “Crismis” tale, Dillon, the protagonist and the author, goes on a time-traveling adventure after the star on the tree explodes. “Santa comes,” he said, explaining the next part of the plot. After that, Dillon comes across five trees, and […]

A Sherlock Holmes Mystery at the Grolier Club

This has the makings of a detective story with hints of history: Why did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sign a pirate edition of “The Sign of the Four,” the second of the four Sherlock Holmes novels? Conan Doyle hated pirate editions. He was as famous for denouncing pirate publishers as they were infamous for grinding […]

Joan Didion, ‘New Journalist’ Who Explored Culture and Chaos, Dies at 87

Joan Didion, whose mordant dispatches on California culture and the chaos of the 1960s established her as a leading exponent of the New Journalism, and whose novels “Play It as It Lays” and “A Book of Common Prayer” proclaimed the arrival of a tough, terse, distinctive voice in American fiction, died on Thursday at her […]

bell hooks, Pathbreaking Black Feminist, Dies at 69

“I think of bell hooks as being pivotal to an entire generation of Black feminists who saw that for the first time they had license to call themselves Black feminists,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia, said in an interview. “She was utterly courageous in terms of putting on paper thoughts that many of […]

Anne Rice, Who Spun Gothic Tales of Vampires, Dies at 80

When she was 15 her mother died; she said she believed the cause was alcoholism, something Ms. Rice would struggle with later, though in a 2008 video she said she had been sober for 28 years. By her late teens, she had become disillusioned with the Catholic faith. “I have a great deal of anger […]

Coffee or Chai? At 2 Kolkata Cafes, ‘Adda’ Is What’s Really on the Menu

KOLKATA, India — At one of the cafes, to ask for chai is to invite a gaze of withering contempt from the turbaned waiter, as if blasphemy has been committed: It’s called the Indian Coffee House, stupid. At the other cafe, exclusively chai is served, slow-cooked over coal fire in the same dark kitchen for […]