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A library of interviews with the world’s biggest thinkers.
6mins
The biggest mistake that novice screenwriters make is trying to follow what’s trendy.
3mins
The main difference between screenwriting, playwriting and prose is the degree of conflict that interests the writer.
A conversation with the author and screenwriting guru.
2mins
What burdens does the author of “The Things They Carried” still bear?
3mins
Reflections on the younger generation, and on growing old.
3mins
The author and former veteran sees none of his generation’s “edgy,” questioning attitude in the modern military.
5mins
The rebellious anger of the Vietnam era hasn’t stopped war. In fact, “a slight stink of the hip” now surrounds our cultural memory of the event.
3mins
Writing about dead loved ones can’t bring them back—or even preserve their memories, really. But it’s something.
4mins
For Tim O’Brien, “true war stories” can be lies, or take place years before or after a war. Here he shares one that made him want to cry—and reminds him […]
4mins
Part of a writer’s job is to puncture our clichés about subjects like love and war with irony, edge, and ridicule.
5mins
How to convey the horror of war to someone who’s never witnessed it? It’s language, not the pain of remembering, that makes the task so hard.
5mins
Two decades after his masterpiece, the author reflects on war, fatherhood, and the passage of time that’s made him feel like “a stranger to the person who wrote that book.”
2mins
Writing never gets easier, but there are certain mistakes writers can learn to avoid.
45mins
A conversation with the National Book Award-winning writer.
2mins
Siri Hustvedt recommends an “extraordinary, unusual little book.”
4mins
The novelist on having a fellow author (Paul Auster) as a spouse, and the state of mind that’s essential to good writing.
3mins
The “crossing of senses,” in perception and memory, was once considered too strange to study. Now scientists suspect it’s universal, at least in infancy.
3mins
Studying a humiliating memory from her own childhood convinced the author that we “place” what we remember, and vice versa.
4mins
The author once had a weird, wonderful vision induced by a migraine, but believes other hallucinations are common variations of pathologies.
4mins
How the emerging science of neuropsychoanalysis is reviving Sigmund Freud’s old project: analyzing the subjective experience of the individual mind.