Writing and Writers
She Witnessed Mao’s Worst Excesses. Now She Has a Warning for the World.
In 1955, not long after Ms. Chen joined the Central Film Bureau, Hu Feng, a well-known Chinese Marxist writer, was detained for penning a report arguing that literature should allow for greater expressiveness. His words triggered a purge that rippled through Ms. Chen’s circle of friends and colleagues, some of whom were accused of being […]
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‘Hunters’: David Weil on Hunting Nazis as Collective Catharsis
What were you doing before “Hunters”? When I moved out to L.A. in 2011, I was tutoring kids in Beverly Hills and the Palisades and Santa Monica from about 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., then I would drive home to my little apartment in West Hollywood and write from 10 p.m. until 4 in the […]
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B.J. Novak Went to Texas Looking for ‘Vengeance’ and Found America
A funny story that B.J. Novak likes to tell from the making of his new movie is about the day he thought he was having a stroke. Are you chuckling yet? At the start of 2020, Novak, a writer, comedian and alumnus of “The Office,” had finally gotten the green light to make “Vengeance,” a […]
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The Life and Death of Daniel Auster, a Son of Literary Brooklyn
In a Brooklyn subway station one April morning, as commuters waited for a G train, a 44-year-old man named Daniel Auster was found unconscious on a platform after a drug overdose. He was brought to the Brooklyn Hospital Center, where he died six days later, after being taken off life support. A D.J. and photographer […]
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Emily Henry, Author of ‘Book Lovers,’ on the Appeal of Travel
Over the last three years, the novelist Emily Henry has established a solid beachhead on summertime best seller lists with a series of travel-related rom-coms, starting with “Beach Read” in 2020, and followed by last summer’s “People We Meet on Vacation” and this year’s “Book Lovers.” All three novels currently share space on The Times’s […]
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Why Are There so Many Books and Shows About Cannibalism?
An image came to Chelsea G. Summers: a boyfriend, accidentally on purpose hit by a car, some quick work with a corkscrew and his liver served Tuscan style, on toast. That figment of her twisted imagination is what prompted Ms. Summers to write her novel, “A Certain Hunger,” about a restaurant critic with a taste […]
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Susie Steiner, Author of Acclaimed British Crime Novels, Dies at 51
To Ms. Steiner, vision problems were, in some ways, a blessing as well as a curse. “My sight loss,” she wrote in The Independent, “which has begun to limit me only in the past five years, has accompanied an increase in my creative output as a novelist. The two seem intertwined, as if the less […]
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Taika Waititi on “Thor” and “Our Flag Means Death”
Even when your job is to dream up the interplanetary adventures of a Norse god, you might still want to run off and play pirates. So during the weeks he was editing “Thor: Love and Thunder,” the Marvel movie that opens on July 8, Taika Waititi, its director and co-writer, would occasionally take weekends off […]
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In ‘First Kill,’ Hunter and Prey Fall in Love
When Victoria Schwab sat down to write a short story for an anthology about vampires in 2019, she already knew that she would adapt whatever she wrote for television. So one of the first questions the author, better known by her pen name, V.E. Schwab, asked herself was, what kind of vampire show did she […]
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