Writer, Editor, Tutor, Teacher

The Essential Toni Morrison Reader The Nobel laureate, who has died at 88, left a rich, powerful literary legacy. These are some of her best — and most essential — books.

For Wittgenstein, Philosophy Had to Be as Complicated as the Knots it Unties In Britain, the arrival of existentialism was celebrated mainly in small literary magazines, beginning in 1947 with a radical Catholic quarterly called The Changing World. The editor, Bernard Wall,…

Do We Care Enough About Animals to Save Them From Extinction? Two years ago, I began writing an essay with the working title “Does It Matter If All the Wild Animals Die?” I’d recently read the World Wildlife Fund’s report, The Living Planet, which found that …

Is Line Editing a Lost Art? “Extraneous baggage”—that was how Albert Erskine, line editor of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, described slow sections of the submitted manuscript. McCarthy listened. He spent months revising and cond…

“You Don’t Know Anything.” And Other Writing Advice from Toni Morrison I can’t think of another writer who is quite so universally beloved as Toni Morrison. Her work is magnificent, her legacy is unimpeachable, and she reveals her brilliance at every opportunity…

Toni Morrison on Reality TV, Black Lives Matter, and Meeting Jeff Bezos In an exclusive interview with Natur & Kulturs Litterära Revy, Ms. Morrison talks with Nadifa Mohamed about literature, police brutality and Kanye West’s birthday presents. This is an excerpt f…

Even A Grammar Geezer Like Me Can Get Used To Gender Neutral Pronouns For anyone struggling to use "they" as a singular pronoun, linguist Geoff Nunberg says: Just practice. He believes human language processing capacity is far more adaptable than people realize.

Toni Morrison, a giant of American letters, has died at 88. Toni Morrison, the prolific author of such classics as Beloved and Song of Solomon, died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. She was 88 years old. Morrison had an outsized influe…

Read a (Love) Letter From Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne 167 years ago today, Ticknor, Reed & Fields published The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel of repentance and slut-shaming. But actually, this isn’t about The Scar…

Are These Bad Habits Creeping Into Your Writing? Many writers rely more heavily on pronouns than I’d suggest is useful. For me this sort of thing comes under the heading Remember that Writing Is Not Speaking. When we talk, we can usually make our…