By Heart
Authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature.
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
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Doug McLean Finding the Emotional Truth in Horror Writing
The novelist Victor LaValle on how dark material hits hardest when it’s balanced out with wonder
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Doug McLean Keeping Track of Every Book You’ve Ever Read
A New York Times editor on the coffee-stained list she’s kept for almost three decades
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Doug McLean When Memories Are True Even When They’re Not
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout discusses Louise Glück’s poem “Nostos” and the powerful way literature can harbor recollection.
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Doug McLean When Writing Is Actually About Waiting
Hannah Tinti, the author of The Good Thief, explains what she learned about patience and risk from the T.S. Eliot poem "East Coker."
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Doug McLean Colum McCann on Facing the Terror of the Blank Page
The award-winning author discusses the poetry of Wendell Berry, and the importance of abandoning yourself to mystery.
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Doug McLean When a Writer’s Great Freedom Lies in Constraint
The memoirist Melissa Febos discusses how an Annie Dillard essay, “Living Like Weasels,” helped refocus her life after overcoming addiction.
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Doug McLean The Peculiar Power of a Zadie Smith Sentence
Dissecting a line from the author’s story “The Embassy of Cambodia,” Jonathan Lee questions his own myopia as a novelist.
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Doug McLean George Saunders on Chekhov's Different Visions of Happiness
The Lincoln in the Bardo author dissects the Russian writer’s masterful meditations on beauty and sorrow in the short story “Gooseberries,” and explains the importance of questioning your stance while writing.
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Doug McLean The Key to Writing a Mystery Is Asking the Perfect Question
The veteran author John Rechy discusses the powerful enigma of William Faulkner and the beauty of the unsolved narrative.
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Doug McLean Finding Meaning in Going Nowhere
Ottessa Moshfegh, the author of the novel Eileen, opens up about coping with depression, how writing saved her life, and finding solace in an overlooked song.
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Doug McLean Opening Paragraphs Don’t Always Have to Be Exciting
The author Emily Ruskovich discusses the uncanny restraint of Alice Munro and the art of starting a short story.
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Doug McLean Making Art at the Painful Margins
What the violent suffering in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot taught the author Laurie Sheck about finding inspiration in torment and illness
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Doug McLean Writing With Infinite Pity
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon discusses what he learned about empathy from Borges’s “The Aleph.”
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Doug McLean When Novels Frustrate, and Enthrall
Franz Kafka’s work taught the writer Jonathan Lethem about how to incorporate chaos into narratives.
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Doug McLean Writing for an Audience of One
The novelist Nell Zink discusses the psalm that inspired her, and what she learned about the solitary artistic process from her Catholic upbringing.
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Doug McLean Emily Dickinson’s Mysterious ‘You’
The poem “Wild Nights! - Wild Nights!” taught the novelist Emma Donoghue about sexuality, ambiguity, and intimacy.
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Characters Don't Change, but Readers Do
The novelist and poet Alice Mattison discusses finding inspiration in the unconventional short stories of Grace Paley.
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Doug McLean Art Should Be Uncomfortable
For the writer Mark Haddon, Miles Davis’s seminal jazz album Bitches Brew is a reminder of the beauty and power of challenging works.
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Doug McLean The Lorax and Literature’s Moral Obligation
Despite critics’ dismissal of activist-minded fiction, the author Lydia Millet believes that Dr. Seuss’s classic children’s book is powerful because of its message, not in spite of it.
