The thing about writing novels is that it must be a form of self-suppression. You don’t matter. The page is not a mirror. 

“When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it’s finished. A certain point comes at which you can’t do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.”

All this week, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from 2013. Happy holidays! Impossible. And yet, of course, not impossible: of course, too possible, too much the reality of what we would always have to face one day, one morning waking…

  Every morning, when my sleeping pill wears off, I am up about five, in my study with coffee, writing like mad—have managed a poem a day before breakfast. All book poems. Terrific stuff, as though domesticity had choked me. —Sylvia Plath, le…

Sit in a theater for a Tom Murphy play and I can guarantee you one thing: you will come out of that theater rattled, and throttled, and staggered, in the best of all possible ways. It might take a long moment, afterwards, to catch your breath; use …

Joyce Carol Oates called her one of the finest short-story writers of the twentieth century, and there’s much to love about the work of Mary Lavin, whose centenary falls this week; there’s the brilliance with which her fiction gets at the stuff…