The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Search results for “advice for writers”

Walt Whitman Reads “America”: The Only Surviving Recording of the Beloved Poet’s Voice
Walt Whitman Reads “America”: The Only Surviving Recording of the Beloved Poet’s Voice

36 seconds of timeliness from a rare wax-cylinder capsule of timelessness.

read article

Happy Birthday, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 21 Essential Reads on Education
Happy Birthday, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 21 Essential Reads on Education

Bertrand Russell, Richard Feynman, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Isaac Asimov, Kio Stark, and more.

read article

Annie Dillard on What a Stunt Pilot Knows About Impermanence, Creativity, and the Meaning of Life
Annie Dillard on What a Stunt Pilot Knows About Impermanence, Creativity, and the Meaning of Life

“Who could breathe, in a world where rhythm itself had no periods?”

read article

Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953
Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953

What a catalog of superficiality reveals about the complex inner worlds of young women.

read article

Conjuring Cohesion and Purpose: How Ursula Nordstrom Cultivated Maurice Sendak’s Genius
Conjuring Cohesion and Purpose: How Ursula Nordstrom Cultivated Maurice Sendak’s Genius

“That is the creative artist — a penalty of the creative artist — wanting to make order out of chaos.”

read article

Gay Talese’s Daily Routine, Plus a Money-Saving Tip from the Godfather of Literary Journalism
Gay Talese’s Daily Routine, Plus a Money-Saving Tip from the Godfather of Literary Journalism

“At 8:00 p.m. I am contemplating the numbing predinner delight of a dry gin martini.”

read article

Italo Calvino’s Poetic Résumé
Italo Calvino’s Poetic Résumé

“Prepared for the Worst, and becoming more and more dissatisfied with the Best, I am already anticipating the incomparable joys of growing old.”

read article

Nabokov on Inspiration and the Six Short Stories Everyone Should Read
Nabokov on Inspiration and the Six Short Stories Everyone Should Read

“A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life.”

read article

Italo Calvino on Writing: Selected Wisdom from a Lifetime of Letters
Italo Calvino on Writing: Selected Wisdom from a Lifetime of Letters

“One writes most of all in order to take part in a collective enterprise.”

read article

How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives: Annie Dillard on Choosing Presence Over Productivity
How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives: Annie Dillard on Choosing Presence Over Productivity

“The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.”

read article

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)