By Heart
Authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature.
A Moby-Dick–Inspired Memoir of Menopause
On a quest to make sense of what was happening to her body, the author Darcey Steinke sought guidance from female killer whales.
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Doug McLean The Purgatory That Comes After Losing a Child
When his 2-year-old daughter died, Jayson Greene turned to writing to survive his grief, and to Dante’s Inferno for words to describe it.
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Doug McLean What Some of the World’s Last Hunter-Gatherers Have to Say
An ancient saying he learned from his subjects, the Lamalerans, showed the journalist Doug Bock Clark how to tell the story of a tribe with no recorded history.
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Doug McLean The Joyce Carol Oates Story That Shares DNA With 'Cat Person’
What the debut writer Kristen Roupenian learned from a masterful tale that dramatizes the horrors of being a young woman
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Doug McLean The Closest of All Possible Encounters
John Wray describes how a wilderness survival guide taught him to face his fears while completing his most challenging book yet.
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Doug McLean E. B. White’s Lesson for Debut Writers: It’s Okay to Start Small
Nicole Chung explains how an essay about sailing taught her to embrace her fears as she worked up to writing her memoir, All You Can Ever Know.
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Doug McLean The Chekhov Sentence That Contains Almost All of Life
Gary Shteyngart dissects one of the “most unexpected” lines in fiction and shares how it influenced his latest novel, Lake Success.
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Doug McLean The Powerful Practice of Writing by Hand
The author Laura van den Berg on what inspired her newest novel, The Third Hotel, and how she accesses the part of the mind that fiction comes from
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Doug McLean A Writer’s Fixation on Sound
The author R. O. Kwon reflects on the relationship of rhythm to writing and how she stopped obsessing over the first 20 pages of her new novel, The Incendiaries.
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Doug McLean What J.D. Salinger Understood About Chance Encounters
A.M. Homes on the short-story writer’s “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” and the lifelong effects of fleeting interactions
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Doug McLean What Richard Pryor’s Stand-Up Can Teach Writers
The nonfiction author Cutter Wood on how the comedian’s work helped him imbue minor characters with emotional life
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Doug McLean How Gabriel García Márquez Created a World in a Sentence
The novelist Mary Morris explains how the opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude shaped her path as a writer.
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Doug McLean Writing a Feminist Novel With a Man’s Point of View
The author Tayari Jones explains what Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon taught her about the centrality of male protagonists in stories that explore female suffering.
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Doug McLean The Necessity of 'Willful Blindness' in Writing
The memoirist Terese Marie Mailhot on how Maggie Nelson’s Bluets taught her to explode the parameters of what a book is supposed to be
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Doug McLean The Technological Shift Behind the World's First Novel
The author Martin Puchner on the way advances in paper production helped pave the way for The Tale of Genji
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Doug McLean What Writers Can Take Away From the Bible
The National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee on how the story of Joseph, and the idea that goodness can come from suffering, influences her work
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Doug McLean Cujo's Unexpected Lesson About Parenting and Art
The comedian and writer John Hodgman explains what Stephen King’s 1981 horror novel taught him about risking mistakes in storytelling—and fatherhood.
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Doug McLean How Surrealism Enriches Storytelling About Women
The author Carmen Maria Machado, a finalist for this year’s National Book Award in Fiction, discusses the brilliance of an eerie passage from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
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Doug McLean What Writers Can Learn From Goodnight Moon
The Little Fires Everywhere novelist Celeste Ng explains how the surprising structure of the classic children’s book informs her work.
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Doug McLean Jenny Zhang: 'Tiny Stories' Are Vital to Literature
The Sour Heart author discusses Roberto Bolaño’s “Dance Card,” humanizing minor characters through irreverence, and homing in on history’s footnotes.
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Doug McLean How Rudyard Kipling Turned His Guilt Into Fiction
The novelist Scott Spencer on the English author’s short story “The Gardener” and what it reveals about transforming shame into art
