Author Almanac
Writers are often treated as monuments. The Almanac remembers that they were people. Each entry begins with a date, anecdote, or overlooked detail and uses it as a way into a life, a work, or a larger conversation about reading, writing, and what survives.
-
05.08 Toni Morrison
I don’t think Toni Morrison wasn’t writing greetings cards. Or motivational posters.
-
24.07 Madeline Miller
‘Who wants to live forever?’, as Queen sang in 1986. On her birthday, let’s explore that idea through Madeline MIller’s retellings (with a little help from Tennyson, Edna St Vincent Millay, and Stephen King).
-
20.07 Cormac McCarthy
We probably all have a book or two we are frightened of reading. Exploring why makes me readier to hit ‘The Road’ with Cormac McCarthy.
-
18.07 Jane Austen
On Jane Austen’s anniversary, don’t begin by rereading Austen. Read something she could never have imagined. Then come back.
-
10.07 John Wyndham
Wyndham’s distinctively British Science Fiction is about much, much more than just man-eating plants or weird children.
-
07.07 Jeff VanderMeer
Weird Fiction isn’t about impossible worlds. Perhaps it’s about discovering that we’ve been looking at the possible one through only a narrow slice of the spectrum.
-
06.07 Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel asks us to consider that hardly anyone is more vulnerable than ‘the power behind the throne’.
-
04.03 Khaled Hosseini
When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth.
-
03.07 Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Sometimes, control arrives wearing the face of kindness, certainty, and good intentions.
-
01.07 James M Cain
Just great crime, or stories about gravity and magnetism? Or why not both?