“A writing contest is a lottery for dreamers. It only stands to reason that some cynical practices flourish there.”

“I wasn’t willing to participate in swindling others into believing that Hungary was open to foreigners…”

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and the dissolution of a modern marriage.

“Isherwood’s prose blends genre and crosses time to revisit key moments in his development as a writer, a gay man, and a global citizen in Berlin.”

The radical promise of Laurie Anderson’s Big Science.

To escape the pandemic, a writer attends the most brutal clown school in the world.

“I have yearned for the right to have nothing to say, and the confidence to say it anyway.”

“Sick, in these days, means alone.”

“I was a fixture, a force, and a fierce advocate of fashion and style,” Talley writes in the memoir’s introduction. He also acknowledges how, for most of his career, he was the only person of color in “the upper echelons of fashion journalism.”