“Get Out.” Advice on Teaching High School From the Late, Great Frank McCourt: On my second day as a rookie English teacher at my alma mater, Stuyvesant High School, I walked down the fourth floor hallway on my way to class. Behind a thick column, lurking in the shadows,… #Biography #CraftandAdvice

The Literary Agent Who Lost the Narrative Thread: As a literary agent, I’ve spent years shaping the stories of other people’s grief. There was the Pulitzer-nominated journalist who’d lost her only child when he was seven. And the Black descendent of Thomas… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Adam Erlich Sachs on Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas: The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast features a series of conversations with past and present Windham-Campbell Prize winners about their favorite books and plays. Hosted by Michael Kelleher. For the… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Emily Wilson Talks Complicated Men, Celebrating Strangeness, and Why There is Always Another Way to Say It: One of the most celebrated classicists writing today, Emily Wilson achieved a rare kind of literary stardom in 2017, when her translation of Homer’s… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Anna Silman on Revisiting the Interview: Welcome to season four of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview. This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer they’re looking for, what makes a… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

How to Get Over the Hump of Writing Sex: This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Only trouble is interesting, and what causes more trouble for us humans than our love lives? With love, we’re leaping into the unknown, and it’s… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Nobody Thought The Ginger Man Would Sell a Single Copy: J.P. Donleavy, called Guts by his closest friends for his fighting spirit, refused rejection. The kid from the Bronx who knew how to box and eventually became famous as the author of The Ginger Man, is revealed in… #Biography #CraftandAdvice

Abdelrahman ElGendy on Writing From Inside a Prison Cell: On his third night in detention in Cairo, crammed with sixty other prisoners into a four-by-five meter cell, Abdelrahman ElGendy heard the song for the first time. Belly full after being starved for three… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Generosity and Personhood: How the Myth of the Three Graces Inspired My Debut Novel: When I walked toward the Roman statue of the Three Graces in The Metropolitan Museum of Art last month, my eyes began to water. I clocked the familiar details in person for the… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Isaac Chotiner on Deep Knowledge and Gotcha Interviews: Welcome to season four of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview. This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer they’re looking… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Eight Simple Rules for Dating Your Historical Fiction: This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Consider these opening lines. Their source is far from obscure, so there’s a good chance you’ll recognize them right away. Take a… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Help, My Writing Group Think My Latest Story Was Really Funny: It Wasn’t Meant to Be: Hello again, gentle readers! Welcome back to another delightful installment of everyone’s favorite bimonthly drunken advice column, Am I the Literary Asshole? It’s a column… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

The Letter Doula: How to Help a Life Arrive on the Page: For years, I believed people avoided letter writing because they lacked time. But after teaching leadership, communication, and storytelling to thousands of students, I’ve come to believe something else… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Stories From Memory: On Finding Inspiration in My Husband’s Moroccan Family: In my living room a framed photograph hangs on the wall. A man clad in balloon pants and torn white shirt tosses a wooden pitchfork full of straw into the air with athletic grace. He’s… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

S. Shakthidharan on Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha: The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast features a series of conversations with past and present Windham-Campbell Prize winners about their favorite books and plays. Hosted by Michael Kelleher. Mike chats with S.… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Agnes Callard on Socrates’ Turf: Welcome to Season Four of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview. This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer they’re looking for, what makes a good #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Dorthe Nors on Striving to Write Emotionally Resonant Fiction: I published my first novel twenty-five years ago. It was not a masterpiece, but to me it was a miracle. Unboxing was still a private phenomenon back then and I remember looking at the book in… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Fiction as a Filter: On Writing the American West’s Water Crisis: Years ago, during the Great Recession, I attended an event sponsored by an environmental organization that had formed in protest to a planned dam construction project on the Cache La Poudre River… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

Christelle Dabos on Empathy, Doing Good, and How We Fill Ourselves Up: It’s Sunday morning, September 18, 2016. I spent the previous day signing books in Lille, in northern France. My head is still foggy. I am making myself a cup of hot chocolate when, at the… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism

A Literary Haunting: What the Ghost of Sylvia Plath Taught Me About Grief: Before the ghost of Sylvia Plath haunted the yellow house on the bluff in my novel White Rabbit, she haunted me. I was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student plagued by the loss of my… #CraftandAdvice #CraftandCriticism