Category: excerpts

• Italo Calvino on what makes great writing great

  From Six Memos for the New Millennium: From its beginnings, my work as a writer has aimed to follow the lightning-fast course of mental circuits that capture and link points that are far apart in space and time. In my fondness for adventure stories and fairy tales, I have always sought something like an inner…

• Don DeLillo on the overview effect

  In “Human Moments in World War III” from The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, an astronaut gazes down at Earth from orbit: The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings. It satisfies every childlike curiosity, every muted desire, whatever there is in him of the scientist, the…