By Heart
Authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature.
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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.
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Doug McLean To Write, Stop Thinking
The writer Kathryn Harrison believes that words flow best when the opaque, unknowable aspects of the mind take over.
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Doug McLean The Deeper Truth of Fiction
Dostoyevsky taught the writer Charles Bock that inventive writing is the most effective way to conjure reality.
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Doug McLean When Art Is an Act of Survival
Melissa Broder of So Sad Today finds solace in Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death and in her own creative process.
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Doug McLean Can Writing Be Both True and Beautiful?
The author Ethan Canin probes the depths of a single sentence in Saul Bellow’s short story “A Silver Dish.”
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Doug McLean Good People Don’t Make Good Characters
Philip Roth taught the author Tony Tulathimutte that writers should aim to show all aspects of their subjects—not only the morally upstanding side.
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Doug McLean Alexander Chee on What Writing Parties Reveals About Characters
The author of The Queen of the Night describes how a scene by Charlotte Bronte showed him the dramatic stakes of social interaction in fiction.
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Doug McLean The Promise of Flawed Characters
The author Paul Lisicky describes how Flannery O’Connor pulls her subjects apart to make them stronger.
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Senohrabek / Shutterstock / Zak Bickel / The ... How to Write: A Year in Advice From ‘By Heart’
Highlights from 12 months of interviews with writers about their craft and the authors they love
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Doug McLean How Fiction Can Survive in a Distracted World
The writer Kevin Barry believes that the medium’s best hope lies in the mesmerizing power of audio storytelling.
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Doug McLean Lorin Stein on the Power of Ambiguity in Fiction
The Paris Review editor discusses why the best stories ask more questions then they answer.
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Doug McLean When People—and Characters—Surprise You
Mary Gaitskill, author of The Mare, explains how a single moment in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina reveals its characters’ hidden selves.
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Doug McLean ‘Stories Are a Living Thing’
The ex-Granta editor John Freeman on how the author Louise Erdrich perfectly interprets Faulkner
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Doug McLean Lauren Groff on Writing With Lightness
The Fates and Furies author describes how Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse portrays the span of life.
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Doug McLean The Magic of Where the Wild Things Are
The author and illustrator Brian Selznick discusses how Maurice Sendak showed him the power of picture books.
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Doug McLean Subverting the Rule of ‘Write What You Know’
The novelist Angela Flournoy discusses how Zora Neale Hurston helped her imagine characters and experiences alien to her.
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Doug McLean How Literature Inspires Empathy
The Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Al Aswany explains how one word in Dostoyevsky’s novel The House of the Dead showed him how literature can help us understand one another.
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How Writers Can Find Meaning in Nonsense
The author Jesse Ball discusses Lewis Carroll's ‘Jabberwocky’ and how precise prose doesn’t always make for powerful work.
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Doug McLean How Writing Achieves Grace
The author Mary-Beth Hughes discusses how Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel The Blue Flower showed her that words can dance.
