The story that stayed with a young Larry McMurtry, more than any of the cowboy exploits, was the one about a molasses barrel. McMurtry's grandfather had traveled by wagon 18 miles to Archer City for winter provisions, returning with an 80-pound barrel of sorghum molasses, the nearest thing to sugar at the time.
Helen DeWitt's refusal of the Windham-Campbell prize highlights the tension between artistic integrity and the demands of self-promotion in the literary world.
No one I know wants to go spend their one wild and magical life being a shill for some billionaire tech asshole, says Shannon, a character in Yesteryear, the buzzy new novel about a tradwife influencer by Caro Claire Burke.
When I finished art school, I thought I was going to do monumental sculpture, big works, and I did for a while. But what I started loving the most-actually always loved the most-was the start, where you figure out what you want to say.
I moved to New York in 2016, with the intention of staying exactly 12 months: to report on an electric election year and then return home with a chapter of my eventual memoir tucked away in my mind. Instead, I stayed for almost a decade.
I was stealing other people's definitions of happiness and trying to make them fit my life. I'd walk past neighbors' houses at night, see their living rooms lit up through the windows, and think that's what I was missing.
François Ozon's adaptation of The Stranger, while visually stunning, reveals the limitations of cinema in depicting the complex inner states of consciousness that Camus masterfully crafted in his text.
