Essays on why stories work, the true history under the fiction, and conversations with the people who put books in hands.
Every address in Hemingway's memoir checks out — the flat, the salon, the bookshop, the printing press. A walking tour of the city where modern literature was manufactured, and the economics that made it possible.
Read the storyThe iceberg theory is writing by informed omission: most of the writer’s knowledge stays below the surface, while selected actions and details let the reader feel it.
The Hemingway daiquiri grew from Ernest Hemingway’s real association with El Floridita in Havana, but the name now covers several different drinks.
No manuscript, letter, interview or person who knew Ernest Hemingway connects him to the baby-shoes story. Here is what the surviving evidence shows.
Van Gogh wanted a brotherhood of painters in the south. He got Paul Gauguin, nine weeks of side-by-side work, and the most famous quarrel in modern art. What the evidence supports, what only Gauguin's memoir claims, and what the sunflowers meant — round by round.
Nin paid for Tropic of Cancer with six hundred dollars borrowed from her psychoanalyst, then wrote its preface. The affair is the part everyone knows. The money is the part that got the book printed.
If you have gone looking for Colette's Earthly Paradise and come back confused, the fault is not yours. There are three of them, and they are not editions of one another.
Fitzgerald vouched for Hemingway before he'd met him and edited him better than he edited himself. Hemingway outlived him and wrote the eulogy crooked. The friendship, round by round.
Summer reading is a matching problem, not a ranking problem. Our seasonal guide pairs the moderns to the July you're actually having.
The most famous label in modern literature started as a complaint about a slow car repair. What 'lost' actually meant — and why the writers it named never accepted it.
