But autobiographical novels like Andrea Hirata’s The Rainbow Troops seem less common today. Some novels contain an autobiographical element, but few marketing departments type it up in their promotional materials. Usually, unless they need to manipulate the truth extensively, authors opt to write a memoir, a genre that sells better and that remains a bit further out along on the fact continuum.
Read my essay at the Paris Review Daily: “Toward the end of 1918, infantry from the U.S. Army’s 85th Division occupied Arkhangelsk, a city in North Russia on the shore of the White Sea.”
To Whom It May Concern: Long before technology enabled users to converse with their friends and loved ones in 140-character tweets, people had to inform the world about their mundane lives the old-fashioned way: by writing letters.
Michael Chabon returns from the wilderness with a new novel about love, pain and the interconnected lives of two American families.
Over 185 years since Nicéphore Niépce took the world’s first photograph—a photogravure of Pope Pius VII in 1822—the process of photography continues to develop in unanticipated ways.
