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Doctors have been writers for as long as they have been doctors. The disciplinary divide between the humanities and sciences is a recent invention. Judging by the quantity and quality of writing by doctors in the past several decades alone, I might also suggest that some of our best philosophers have been physicians.
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is more than a book about mothers and daughters, although it’s easy to choose sides while reading the generational 1989 novel.
Last month, I wrote about the starring role food plays in Peter Mayle’s memoir, A Year in Provence. Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy has been called the Italian equivalent of Mayle’s book. Mayes is a poet, so it is natural that her prose charms readers with evocative detail and lyrical language.
Every year at the open of the annual AWP Conference, we publish our gender statistics, taking a cue from VIDA’s important work. While we don’t collect demographic information on any of our writers, we publish the gender statistics of those whose gender identities we can find documented elsewhere (their work, their social media profiles, etc.)…
Doug Mack is not your average travel writer. In his new book, The Not-Quite States of America: Dispatches from the Territories and Other Far-Flung Outposts of the USA, Mack goes to the five American colonies, shedding stark light on the politics and history of the mainland.
In January, Safia Elhillo’s debut collection, The January Children, brought her poems to my doorstep, and many others, as it became Amazon’s top new release in African Poetry. I had the chance to chat with Elhillo about her collection and to discuss what it means to be a writer during this shameful moment in American history.
From Hillary Clinton’s deal with Simon & Schuster to Warren Buffett’s life-changing read, here’s the latest literary news.
In Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories, immigrants live in a world defined by language, its possibilities, its dead-ends. The legal and political aspects of immigration don’t appear to be the biggest cause of trouble for the characters. Language, however, that first branch of culture, is another matter: characters must continuously code-switch, juggle, negotiate, conceal, and readjust.
Lore Segal’s “At Whom the Dog Barks” is not so much concerned with cause and effect as it’s concerned with coincidence and pattern. Or perhaps coincidence is the name for cause and effect outside the realm of human perception.
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