It was while listening to a Tamil story on Spotify that the thought occurred to me: Listening to stories in vernacular Indian languages had changed my writing. Some of the influence came from the cadences of speech. Some came … Read more
My wife, Karen, and I happen to have for more than a decade a good Catholic pastor, Msgr. Robert Gibbons. Among his many gifts, he is a news junkie and is endlessly fascinated with language and literature. (He is … Read more
A recent One Great Sentence post, about a line from Dan Zak’s essay for the Washington Post about the political culture of Iowa, inspired me to add a few thoughts. The sentence in question is the … Read more
Editor’s note: The sentence in our headline is not the One Great Sentence flagged by Storyboard contributor Jill U. Adams. It’s the opening sentence of a profile of Iowa that sets up the sentence Adams really wrote about. “Somewhere between … Read more
The opening paragraph of Rebecca Solnit’s new LitHub essay, “Why the President Must Be Impeached,” is a single sentence, 88 words long. It is one of the shortest paragraphs in a 20-paragraph soliloquy about her take on the … Read more
Why is it so great? The writing in this famous passage is so good that George Orwell wrote a parody of it designed to ridicule the bloated writing of his day: “Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success … Read more
“No single gesture would do more to demonstrate continuity and stability — to show that the government of the United States would continue to function without interruption despite the assassination of the man who sat at its head — and … Read more
In August 1991, I read John Cheever’s journal excerpts published in The New Yorker. I was a 19-year-old college dropout, a waitress, and in the half hour before starting my shift, I sat outside my local library, electrified by this candid, … Read more
It’s hard to cull just one sentence from Sedaris’ embedded reporting on being a helper at Santaland, a place he describes as “a real wonderland” with a path taking visitors through the “ten thousand sparkling lights, false snow, train sets, … Read more
This week on Storyboard we spotlighted two pieces of historical nonfiction, with one telling the story of America’s first detectives, back in the time of Charles Dickens, and the other reaching back just 40 years, to the brutal Argentine dictatorship that … Read more
