The Columbia Review
The Rumpus
“Corey Sobel, Strictly Speaking, Doesn’t Exist”
On David Lynch, John Cassavetes, the Holy Trinity, and more.
Literary Hub
The Craft of Writing: “I Won’t Kill It. I’ll Just Surprise It.”
How Willa Cather uses physical details in service to emotional ends.
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“A Case for Football as the Most Literary of American Sports”
Baseball has reigned long enough.
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“7 of the Year’s Best Debut Novelists on Their First Literary Loves”
How does a nine-year-old boy learn about Sylvia Plath?
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“5 Writers, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers”
“I’ve worked enough jobs that did not involve writing, and have been part of so many cultures and lived in so many settings where writing was seen, at best, as a necessary evil, that I honestly, earnestly cannot imagine wanting to do anything else.”
Epiphany
“Introducing: Music for Desks”
“It’s difficult enough to write about the mysterious interaction between writing and music, and it might be harder still to write an introduction to a column about that interaction—if writing about music is like dancing with architecture, then what I’m doing now is essentially dancing about a dance with architecture.
See what I mean?”
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“Music for Desks: Ascent”
“This is the peace of upper atmospheres. This is the idea of flying. The dream of it, of being that eagle, the sound of wind steadily pushing past our feathers.”
Largehearted Boy
“A Playlist for The Redshirt“
“I imagine all first novels are nice and fraught for their authors; it definitely was for me, not least because The Redshirt is deeply informed by my own experience of being a scholarship D1 player who had a not-uncomplicated relationship to the game. And yet, as soon as I started writing this piece, I found myself eager to reconnect with these characters, to keep exploring their lives and the lives surrounding them. Accordingly, the songs below serve as soundtracks to scenes I never wrote, scenes that allowed me to delve a bit deeper into the King College milieu. So if The Redshirt is the album, then the following scenes are the extra tracks you would get on the deluxe edition.”
Corey Sobel 