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Crime and the City: Visiting Amsterdam’s Dark Side
Amsterdam—a good place to start Literary Hub’s investigation of the world’s Crime Cities. Everyone has an image of Amsterdam, an idea of what it’s like—canals, bicycles, harmonized urban living; a...
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Julie Buntin on the Joys and Tragedies of Teenage Girlhood
Two girls converge in a rural wood—and one won’t make it out again. Fifteen-year-old Cat comes to Silver Lake with her mother, who is looking for a fresh start. Cat finds her own fresh start in...
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Mothers Who Leave Their Children
This morning I heard two different stories of a mother who left with a man. Amanda Kristine Hawkins was the first; she left her two-year-old and one-year-old daughters in her car for fifteen hours....
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In Mid-Life, The Wonderful Non-Deliverance of Ayahuasca
I walked through a maze of low-flung buildings and saw Jose—thin-boned and bearded—waving at me from his small balcony. His apartment was decked in a mishmash of Indian, Chinese and South American folk...
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The Onstage Origins of Van Morrison’s Legendary Astral Weeks
It’s possible that no one besides Peter Wolf has heard any recording of Van Morrison’s various Boston lineups since they toured around New England in the summer of 1968. Even the musicians who made up...
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How Psilocybin Could Be Used in Mental Health Treatment
At New York University, psilocybin trips take place in a treatment room carefully decorated to look more like a cozy den than a hospital suite. The effect almost works, but not entirely, for the...
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Sex, Drugs, Rock n’ Roll, and Mystical Poets
“God gave rock n’ roll to you, put it in the soul of everyone.” –Kiss, singing in the sequel to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. HOW TO (SAY) FUCK AND MEAN IT Beth...
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Looking for God in the Writing of Denis Johnson
In an article titled “Bikers for Jesus,” Denis Johnson described himself flippantly as “a Christian convert, but one of the airy, sophisticated kind.” It was the sort of claim he made often, and it...
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The Unexpected Literary Pleasure of Marijuana Reviews
There is a joyful corner of the internet where people don’t argue, trolls don’t troll, and the only kind of self-consciousness is an exploration of consciousness itself: the review sections of...
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How Did So Many Writers Get Access to Opiates?
“I owe it my perfect hours.” –Jean Cocteau Jean Cocteau was born in 1889 and became addicted to opium in London in 1904, after a 20-day bout of neuralgia. “It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless;...
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Chris Rush on Confronting the Ghosts of His Past
Writing a book was never part of the plan. My whole life I’ve been a painter. By three or four, I had a brush in my hand. Childhood was a wave of watercolors, tempera, and ink. For decades, without...
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Russell Brand on Rehab, Recovery, and Choosing the Right Mentor
A recovering drug addict is a contradiction by definition and Chip is a fine example. A nerd bank robber. Middle-class scum. Pious atheist. I didn’t make him a mentor when he diagnosed my addiction, at...
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T Kira Madden on Writing Into the Space of Her Father’s Absence
T Kira Madden is the guest on this week’s Otherppl. Her new memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, is available from Bloomsbury. It was the official March pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book...
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Two Poems by Albert Goldbarth
Rumi, Hawking What if our lives are an alien planet’s computer game? Or what if we’re the dreams they have in another dimension? Dana’s been doing a drug that has her asking the questions a prophet...
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Plunging Into the 1970s’ Altered States of Awareness
Remember Pizzagate, the insane 2016 conspiracy theory claiming that Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman John Podesta were involved with a child sex-trafficking ring being run out of the basement...
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The Hypocrisy of Big Business’ Relationship to Cannabis
The weed business is booming. So much so that the Green Rush, the surge of commercial opportunities opening up in the sale of weed, will soon be old news. Weed remains illegal under federal law,...
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Live From Miami: T.C. Boyle on Writing About LSD and Outside Looking In
In this episode, taped live at the Miami Book Fair, writer T.C. Boyle talks to Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell about writing his latest novel, Outside...
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The Devastating Fallout of Addiction and Corporate Burnout
Now here we are, with poignant speeches, funny stories, even music. Anna has prepared an emotionally wrenching a capella version of “Blackbird,” the only Beatles song her late father ever liked. Last...
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How Do You Write a Memoir of the Unknown?
Write what you know, they say. This is what I know. On November 19, 2013, my younger sister, Sarah, died of a drug overdose in the bathroom of her boyfriend’s home. She was 24 years old and an opiate...
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“Any sort of drug distorts it.” Truman Capote on writing under the influence.
Truman Capote—the man who created Holly Golightly, wrote the most famous true crime book of all time, sparred with Gore Vidal, and threw the party to end all parties—would have turned 96 today....
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