Author name: Kristin Barton

The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day TODAY: In 1881, Fyodor Dostoevsky dies in St. Petersburg, Russia. Source link

“The rolling, appreciating laughter of the audience at Spirit-in-the-Woods had cured her of the sad year she’d just gotten through. But it wasn’t the only element that had cured her; the whole place had done that, as though it was one of those nineteenth-century European mineral spas.”–Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings*  Last summer, a young student

Kiki de Montparnasse sits on the tapestry spread across the floor, its chessboard pattern splayed out like an invitation to a game. She pulls down the fabric wound around her hips so that some of it lies along the ridge of her thighs while the rest falls behind to reveal the summit of her backside.

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Not until my husband Rob and I were rolling maki under the sharp eye of my Japanese mother did I crack a mystery that has confounded me for years: why some writing students in the MFA program that I now direct soar, while others never

While much science fiction is based on theoretical physics, occasionally literature returns the favor and inspires scientific ideas. A perfect symbiosis between the two came about in the early 1980s, when astronomer-turned-novelist Carl Sagan was researching his fictional work Contact and turned to his friend physicist Kip Thorne for advice. Sagan wished to devise a

The angel had been with me for nearly four decades, and it was my fault he was gone. I was 36 when I started sharing the secret of my lifelong history with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) beyond my closest family and therapist. My writing group was meeting regularly at my dining room table. Every few weeks,

The following is from Gayl Jones’ White Rat. Jones was born in Kentucky in 1949. Her books include Corregidora, Eva’s Man, Mosquito, and The Healing, the last a National Book Award finalist and New York Times Notable Book of the Year as well as Palmares, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the recently published The Birdcatcher,