I have read enough about the fundamental complexity of all things, down to the very protons and neutrons, to feel at ease saying this: Beauty disciplines. I know my two-word sentence is not intelligible by conventional standards. I hope by means of it to move a little beyond these standards and to begin to justify…
The Danger of the Everyday On September 7, 1978, while crossing London’s Waterloo Bridge on his way to work at the BBC, the Bulgarian writer and journalist Georgi Markov was shot in the right leg with a 1.52-millimiter poisonous pellet—as tiny as the tip of a ballpoint pen—by an undercover agent of Bulgaria’s intelligence services….
At twenty-five and with little direction in my life, I decided to volunteer in a soup kitchen. Several years after graduating college, things had fallen into a quarter-life stability: I was living in Boston, working as an administrative assistant at a nonprofit, making enough money to cover expenses and go out to dinner and drinking…
“I had to get away from her,” my husband whispered as we lay together in bed. For thirty years, I’d heard only his sharp, flinted words, the stories about his mother no more than a few terse sentences—“She sacrificed me to my stepfather. She let him beat me. She beat me too”—his resentment flaring on…
I sat in the corner of a crowded one-room bookshop nibbling a complimentary madeleine and listening for the words that would signal the start of a marathon reading. “For a long time,” Marcel Proust’s seven-volume In Search of Lost Time begins, “I used to go to bed early.” Bed was a long way off for…
In nonfiction, our winner is Ellen Adams for her essay “The Something I Am Telling You.” Nonfiction judge Meghan Daum said of the piece: “In telling the story of a brain losing its moorings, the author pulled off an astonishing trick and made me feel like the brain itself was talking to me. There is…
“I am a farmer, all I own is in the sun and rain.” In the uncultivated prairies of central Alberta, Stephan G. Stephansson (1853–1927) grew life into the land, raised a large family, helped build a thriving community, and composed more than 2,300 pages of poetry and 1,700 pages of prose. After long days in…
Ann Beattie recommends After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Search by Sarah Perry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). “It’s the story of a murder, but it’s an amazing account of class in America, of life on the fringe of a fabric we now see fraying more every day. It’s beautifully written and I’m amazed that…
In the fall of 1987 after driving across the country to study at the University of Iowa, I found myself enrolled in James Alan McPherson’s fiction workshop, not knowing how I’d ended up there. The rumor circulated that, like a magisterial conductor of a symphony orchestra, the Iowa Workshop office manager, Connie Brothers, somehow made…
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