Maigret’s Room
This story covering Georges Simenon’s prolific career, and his most well-known creation Commissaire Maigret, serves as a helpful primer for writing compelling fiction.
Le Cantiche
A beatifully designed and developed tribute to Dante’s The Divine Comedy, released 700 years after the work was written.
A Consciousness of Reality
A 1954 essay by W.H Auden examining Virginia Woolf’s career and legacy through her own diary.
The real story behind Harper Lee’s lost true crime book
The story behind Harper Lee’s unpublished project The Reverend, a true crime book about a serial killer from Alabama. The piece outlines Lee’s keen urge to get to the truth of matters, and separate that truth from opinion. This was a concern that amongst other things led her to lament Truman Capote’s approach in a letter to The New Yorker’s fact-checker – “Truman’s having long ago put fact out of business had made me despair of ‘factual’ accounts of anything.”
Robert A. Caro on the Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives
One of the great biographers writes about his discovery process, writing, and his experience researching the subject of his magnum opus, President Lyndon B. Johnson. Unsurprisingly, it’s a mesmerisingly well-told story.
Margaret Atwood, the Prophet of Dystopia
A profile of the novelist who has conjured up a series of dystopian worlds that on occasion now seem all too recognisable.
The Plot Against America
An essay on Philip Roth’s 2004 counterfactual novel, which imagines that famed flying ace and isolationist Charles Lindbergh won the Republican nomination for the 1940 US Presidential Election, and proceeded to embark on a campaign of persecution.
The Art of Biography
The Paris Review interviews a master of political biography, whose epic work on President Lyndon Johnson has only reached the start of his Presidency after four volumes. Caro eloquently described his philosophy on biography at a round table with Kurt Vonnegut in 1999 – “I realized that what I wanted to do was to use biography as a means of illuminating the times and the great forces that shape the times – particularly political power.”
Who Gets A Happily Ever After In 2018?
A look at how the romance fiction genreÕs politics are evolving in the era of #MeToo and Trump.