I’ll be binge-reading Jane Austen again this winter, in honor of her 250th birthday. Few novelists of any era offer as much perception, delight, and insight on every page.

On fathers, sons, music, and the Southwest Freeway

MJ Lenderman's latest album showcases his ability to conjure characters through a single line or verse.

The early days of high school—the first weeks, first months—linger in my mind mostly as a string of minor humiliations. Nothing awful at all, nothing remotely earth-shattering, but somehow these little humiliations stick around all these years later.…

Every few years, from childhood until my late teens, my granddad would take me along with him to the small Texas town where he grew up—Normangee, population 522—to visit old relatives and even older graves. The drive took us up I-45, beyond the…

In the early stages of reading Clemens Meyer’s While We Were Dreaming—the first fifty pages, let’s say—I couldn’t remember the title. A buddy of mine asked me what I’d been reading lately, and I told him I was reading this long German novel about a…

Of all the things I loved to do when I was a kid, the one I most wish I could do again is this: driving around with my granddad. When I was five or six, I was obsessed with cranes—the construction machinery, not the bird—and J. Ray would drive me…

The essays of Montaigne aren’t the easiest sell in the twenty-first century. The French nobleman wrote 107 of them, all composed in the final decades of the sixteenth century, totaling nearly nine hundred pages in the bulky English edition resting…

When I was little, a professional basketball player lived on our street. This was back in the eighties, when most NBA players made less than a million per year, and some made five figures. Our neighborhood1 wasn’t fancy, but the Professional…

In 1899, at the height of his fame, Anton Chekhov offered his elder brother Alexander some writing advice: “To have as few failures as possible in fiction writing, or in order not to be so sensitive to failures, you must write more, around one…

Before 5th grade, I lived happily oblivious to the entire concept of failure. In school or sports or social interactions, I never worried about failing. It’s not that I constantly excelled—I remember running straight from first base to third, via the…

Personal essay from the Southwest Review about growing up, 90s country, and hiding what you love.

Hua Hsu’s perceptive and unforgettable memoir, Stay True, focuses mostly on his college years—and one particularly meaningful and heartbreaking friendship from that period—but it begins with the story of his father and a fax machine. In the early…

There’s a certain kind of perfectionism that we associate with artistic genius. Consider, for example, James Joyce, the patron saint of literary obsessiveness, working for years on his last two books, revising and rewriting and rearranging even as he…

By Burke Nixon Last January, I broke my hand punching a wall during a pickup basketball game. I’m a grown man, over forty. I don’t punch things, living or inanimate. But I was amped up, and I got fouled on a drive by a basketball buddy of mine who’s…

Just after I started reading Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, Keith Gessen’s captivating new book about the perplexities of parenting and fatherhood, I made a brief spectacle of myself at a swimming pool. I’d invented a game in which my kids took…

The other day, I opened my laptop and discovered that a new artificial intelligence program may soon make my job obsolete. I teach writing to first-year college students at Rice University, and just as I prepared to celebrate the end of a long…

Akira Kurosawa’s collaborative writing process on Ikiru complicates the cliché of the film auteur whose artistic vision is solely their own. The thought of my eventual death pops up in mind occasionally. I feel that I’m not ready to die just yet, and…

In Texas, where I live, nobody uses the word summer as a verb. We’re aware that some people on the East Coast use the word this way, but it strikes us as deeply pretentious—not just a sign that you have money, but a sign that you have money and…

Critical advice for the new college student During the very first class of my freshman year, I made a mistake that I’ve been thinking about for a couple decades now. The class was an English seminar, with maybe 20 students total, desks arranged in a…