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In the late 1980s, the British music critic Simon Reynolds coined the term “miserabilism” to describe Morrissey and the numerous Manchester bands spreading their very personal gloom across the globe. The word could also be applied to the “Merritt Parkway Novel,” Gerald Howard’s term for the miserabilist fiction produced within a stone’s throw of the [...]

I became a writer for the office supplies.

I didn’t send you the ritual I have of masturbating to horse porn before writing.

Traditionally, we think of science generating objective stories and art generating subjective ones. There is of course gray area here: the specific experiments that are pursued defines what part of the overwhelmingly complex “objective” story of the universe gets told, and the specific stories revealed by those experiments can be used to inform multiple more expansive stories. To think of science as representing a purely objective truth is a misnomer; however, some part of the objective/subjective distinction still holds.

Portland State University’s graduate program in Creative Writing has joined forces with us crazy Tin House folks to establish the Tin House Writer-in-Residence at PSU. The aim of this partnership is to bring national caliber writers to Portland for in-depth teaching opportunities in PSU’s Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing, as well as [...]

“I masturbate to Ben Percy porn. Duh.”

Did you know that Tin House is now on Tumblr?

What books most remind you of summer?

Almost every Christmas, spring break, and summer dad packed us in the car and took off. Mom came too, but she was like us kids—along for the ride. Over the years, we drove through all the contiguous states stopping at roadside attractions and to take pictures of signs like THIS BLOOD’S FOR YOU, CLUCK U CHICKEN, and BIG WONG’S CHINESE.  We [...]

For those of you in Portland, we hope to see you at our little party this evening. Doors open at 7:30. For those of you elsewhere, why not be impulsive? Hop on a train, buy a plane ticket, commandeer a ship. Or better yet……

You’ll Want To Bookmark This.

“My objects are perfectly useless,” he said, “the opposite of the gadgets our consumer society is so greedy fo

It’s an attachment, I would say to you. An attachment with no usefulness in real life.

Regardless of where you’re going to, or for how long, we’ve compiled some been-there-done-that tips to help you have the best, safest, and healthiest workshop of your life.

Hypnotic and disquieting, The Listeners, Leni Zumas’s debut novel, is about not looking at things—loneliness, guilt, Iraq war footage, a sister’s death—and what happens when these things insist on being seen. From the first line the prose is glorious: honest and hallucinatory—like a lucid dream. The wonderfully talented Luca Dipierro created a trailer that brings [...]

It feels like the loss of someone like Ms. Rich is limitless… because it is limitless.

Brown’s alien dreamscapes were rendered in a more sophisticated, naturalistic palette that included shades of violet, foggy grays, icy greens, and soft blues, and portrayed Martian hordes viewed from the perspective of a cowering shrink-rayed populace.

Most of you are familiar by now (or should be anyway) with artist Matt Kish’s stunning (and massive) Moby Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page. We’re thrilled to announce that his next undertaking will be an illustrated edition of Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece, Heart of Darkness. This project–unlike his Moby Dick–will include the the full [...]

“I learned that as humbling and painful as it is to let your readers see you as someone who is despicable, they must, for only then will you win their heart, and if you don’t win the heart of a reader then, well, what have you done?”

Decluttering a manuscript involves the same process as readying a house for sale, making a space for another person to move without the author’s preoccupations, tics and obsessions intruding constantly.

“Given the choice, the writers cared more about paying tribute to those who noticed something special about them than they did about settling scores or getting the last word.”

Given the overlap of literary and scientific worlds, we at Tin House asked ourselves, why are they at odds? And could we, as a literary magazine, do anything to clear the air?

Barney Rosset on Becket’s Film