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

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• 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.

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