The Elephant Vanishes A Novel by Haruki Murakami On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April MorningThe Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's WomenThe Last Lawn of the AfternoonBarn BurningSleep+1 More
Barn Burning A Short Story from The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami The first in agesFive barns worth burningI keep getting older
On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning A Short Story from The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami 100% perfect
The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women A Short Story from The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami Who I was supposed to beQuittingA regular wind-up toy world this is
The Last Lawn of the Afternoon A Short Story from The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami She was wanting to break it off
A Slow Boat to China A Short Story from The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami Can you even call it memory?Never any place I was meant to be
The Age of the Essay An Essay by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com EssayerExpressing ideas helps to form themFlow interesting (The Meander) Follow the brushThe Anxiety of Sequence writing
Essayer To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out. What this site is
Expressing ideas helps to form them If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them. The situation talks backWriting is one way to go about thinkingThe discoveries you make in the making making
Flow interesting (The Meander) The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea. The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course. Always produce interest