Explore

I do not want to fall prey to the bewitchment of my mind by language.

Subtract for the cigarettes, the bourbon, the sleepless nights.

In other words, beachfronts like Bolaño’s and mine are Nowhere.

There are the short and decisive words: yes, no, now, never, love, death, poetry.

Reader, you and I stand once more before the borderless.

Needless to say, when it was my night to read I was beyond terrified.

It holds a place in my heart: Never forget the suspenders.

To see—and to see properly—is the writer’s central responsibility.

Writing is a subversive activity that exempts you from the rules.

Always know the creative life begins again and again.

Abandon the idea that arts and sciences are mutually exclusive.

When a cobra eats it starts with the head, goes to the place that thinks.

what happens in all these villages after we ride through them?

With a couple, there must be one who outlives the other: the survivor.

Wrists will twist or twirl while the hand writes the wriest writs—lamps-lit.

It is natural that the novelist should doubt his ability to cope with his task.

The story is filled with demarcations, limits, invisible as well as overt.

This Lee was a woman, and she was a painter, and she was good.

Handwritten drafts of “Byzantium,” “Easter, 1916,” and other poems.

The handwritten first draft pages of Robert Olen Butler's first novel.

Liza Donnelly

Words and sketches from Gail Godwin’s upcoming novel Flora.

Up north people hunt bears using gummy bears as bait.

Some people are so beautiful they belong everywhere that they go.

You could not look at Leila for long, and yet you longed to look at her.

Manuscript pages from The Blue Flower and The Bookshop.

Ed McClanahan

My parents had seven children; some of us have bank accounts.

The notebooks reveal insertions, deletions, queries, and corrections.