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News and social media channels are buzzing about the recent outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus. This week, write a story in which one of your characters is a doctor responsible for treating patients that have contracted a highly contagious virus. Think about how she handles the risks involved, and what emotions she’ll struggle with. Maybe there is a lack of proper medical equipment or limited space in hospitals and treatment facilities. Is there information on this virus, or is it something doctors have never seen before?
"Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language." Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, was released today by Knopf.
Author Mike Lacher's humor piece titled “In Which I Fix My Girlfriend’s Grandparents’ WiFi and am Hailed as a Conquering Hero" is brought to life in this animated adaptation. The piece was published in The Best of McSweeney's Internet Tendency (McSweeney's Books, 2014).
"There's a great difference between that public world with the prizes, interviews, and public readings, and the private world of the closed door and the hiss of silence." Award-winning novelist Ian McEwan discusses his struggles with confidence and the bliss of writing.
Farming as an occupation isn’t nearly as common in the United States now as it was a century ago, but there are still some people who feel compelled to live a simpler, more self-sufficient lifestyle. This week, write about a character of yours who comes to the decision to give up her more modernized way of living and commits to living “off the grid”—growing all of her own food, raising livestock, collecting sunlight for electricity (or forgoing electricity altogether). How difficult will this be for her to pull off? Is it still feasible for people to live this way in the twenty-first century—especially city dwellers and suburbanites—or is this type of lifestyle too strenuous and time-consuming for the average person to manage?
To mark the centennial anniversary of the publication of James Joyce's Dubliners, author Victor LaValle explains how Joyce's stories about the ordinary people of Dublin influenced his own writing of the underrepresented voices in his Queens neighborhood.
