Book Riot’s Deals of the Day for May 16th, 2019
Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf, publisher of Exhalation by Ted Chiang These deals were active as of this writing, but may expire soon, so get them...
Truth, Beauty, and Oliver Sacks
Oliver Sacks found it impossible to work in the abstract; only when he went to work in a hospital as a neurologist, interacting with patients, did...
Whose Raj?
To the Editors: Max Hastings’s “Staying On” is an essay blighted by prejudice and redolent of the stuffiest traditions of British self-regard. Source : Whose Raj?
Shelley’s Anti-Boney Fides
To the Editors: In his excellent piece on Napoleon, Ferdinand Mount asks why “half the intelligentsia of Europe,” including Percy Bysshe Shelley, “were passionate Napoleonists.” Shelley,...
Watt Nonsense
To the Editors: Not to niggle, but Bill McKibben cites one of the mistakes in history that becomes history itself, by repetition: “Vaclav Smil has pointed...
Voltaire’s Tears
To the Editors: Readers of Anthony Appiah’s instructive, finely reasoned essay “Dialectics of Enlightenment” would have had a more balanced view of Voltaire’s attitude on race...
The Pirates of Palestine?
To the Editors: G.W. Bowersock states that “an old though widespread idea that sea peoples invaded the coast [of Palestine] from the west no longer has...
Alison Kinney Encourages You to Write at the Grocery Store
In our monthly series Can Writing Be Taught? we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This time,...
In “The Day the Sun Died,” Violent Sleepwalkers Terrorize a Town
Reading a Yan Lianke novel is disorienting. His plots are both surreal and absurd, presented in a manner that never reaches the pitch of coy irony....
50 Moves You Can Use in Your Fiction
Dear Blunt Instrument, I just finished writing a novel and am dreaming up a new one, and while I chafe at writing rules, your piece on...
