What is a family? As a child, answering that question felt like the easiest thing in the world. I was still blissfully oblivious, then, to the complexities of family life. The varying configurations, ...

In the old tales, humans come together with animals and plants, mountains and rivers, rain and sky. The wood nymph, Daphne, turns into a laurel tree to escape the pursuit of a god. Seal women slough ...

In the final weeks of the year, there’s no better feeling than getting cozy and delving into your winter reading. It’s the perfect time to revisit old favorites and discover new ones along the way!

This winter, I found myself alone on a small island in Washington, my only company a blue-eyed ragdoll cat named Emerson whom it was my job to keep alive. My goal during these two weeks of cat-sitting ...

I’ve watched so many hours of video, maybe you have too, and I’ve seen people on the internet rise and fall, disappear. I’ve wondered about them after, millions of us have. I’ve even uploaded a few ...

Nothing is easier to poke fun at than the life of a writer, with our overly lofty ambitions, fragile egos, and navel-gazing ways. For this reason, there is no shortage of comedic novels that pull back ...

In the thirteen years since Tana French published her first novel, she’s gained a rabid and dedicated readership (a friend of mine refers to herself as a Tanavangelist), a shelf’s worth of awards ...

For many writers right now, the hardest question isn’t how to respond to the world, but how to keep writing at all without losing the joy that made the work possible. The pressure to address crisis—to ...

When I first decided to write my novel, Their Divine Fires, I knew I wanted to draw on and honor the stories of my grandmother and mother. In the early 1900s, my grandmother’s uncles joined the ...

I was in my twenties the first time I read a memoir set in Lahore, my father’s city, where I’d spent time during my childhood. I was living in Syracuse, New York, then, and I read Meatless Days ...

I wrote large chunks of what would go on to become my novel, Highway Blue, whilst leaning against the windows of various moving trains, buses, cars, and planes. I remember in particular one evening ...

Written in 1872, The Princess and the Goblin is the fairy tale that inspired the next couple hundred years of fantasy literature. Eight-year-old Princess Irene lives mostly alone in a castle secluded ...