John McPhee’s great subject has always been work. From his first book, “A Sense of Where You Are,” which came out in 1965 and portrays basketball star and Rhodes Scholar Bill Bradley, to “Uncommon Carriers” (2006), with its truckers and … Read more
For more than 15 years now, Ted Genoways has been exploring narratives of how America reaps its food. “I think that every story works best when the writer is something of an insider-outsider and then finds a main subject … Read more
Why is it great? Great writers fear not the long sentence, and here is proof. If a short sentence speaks a gospel truth, then a long one takes us on a kind of journey. This is best undertaken when subject … Read more
Almost all of us have home movies of our families somewhere, from the flickering black and white of 8-millimeter film to the Instagramable perfection of an iPhone video. We like to think of them as a kind of homespun cinema … Read more
In the winter of 2012, a pair of lovers set dozens of fires over a span of 20 weeks in remote Accomack County, Virginia—once the richest rural county in America, and now one of the poorest. As one or two … Read more
Sometimes, when the world is too much with us, we just need a love story or a laugh. This week, Storyboard obliged with lots of both. We talked to the writer of a viral Modern Love column in The New … Read more
Perhaps you’ve read that Modern Love essay in The New York Times, the one that zipped around the country along internet tethers and social media synapses in 2015 like contagious hope, bearing an irresistible headline – “To Fall in … Read more
When the writer Caroline Paul was young, she wanted to be an Olympic athlete. Problem was, she says, she wasn’t amazingly gifted. So she picked a sport that didn’t have much competition: the luge. At the recent Power of … Read more
Want an end-of-summer beach read that’ll turn heads faster than a Burkini ban? Consider Asma Lamrabet’s book, Women in the Qur’an: An Emancipatory Reading, which has just been translated into English from the French. Not only is the subject … Read more
Journalists should report the truth. Who would deny it? But such a statement does not get us far enough, for it fails to distinguish nonfiction from other forms of expression. Novelists can reveal great truths about the human condition, and … Read more
