Elaine Szewczyk

1 week ago | publishersweekly.com | Elaine Szewczyk

David Levithan can’t imagine his life without music. He blasts it at home and in his office, and needs it to write. “I listen to music every single moment that I can, from the time I wake up,” Levithan says from his apartment in Hoboken, N.J. “Listening to music when I work gives my language musicality.

2 weeks ago | publishersweekly.com | Elaine Szewczyk

When Holly Smale was diagnosed with autism in 2020 at age 39, a light bulb went off for the British author—and life finally made sense. “The shame I’d been carrying for years drifted away,” Smale says over Zoom from her apartment in the English seaside town of Brighton. Growing up, Smale knew she was different. “I felt like an alien,” she admits. “At school, kids were playing in the sunshine and I was inside facing a wall and reading a book.” She studied her classmates to fit in.

2 weeks ago | buff.ly | Elaine Szewczyk

When Holly Smale was diagnosed with autism in 2020 at age 39, a light bulb went off for the British author—and life finally made sense. “The shame I’d been carrying for years drifted away,” Smale says over Zoom from her apartment in the English seaside town of Brighton. Growing up, Smale knew she was different. “I felt like an alien,” she admits. “At school, kids were playing in the sunshine and I was inside facing a wall and reading a book.” She studied her classmates to fit in.

1 month ago | publishersweekly.com | Elaine Szewczyk

Books are a part of the landscape in Helen Schulman’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In the dining room, they compete for space among the tchotchkes and old family photos. They’re in the bedroom, too, and on the floors and tables. “It’s a mess,” Schulman says of the apartment, where she lives with her husband, the author Bruce Handy. “Our whole house is like somebody else’s garage. My son, when he was little, asked, ‘Is daddy a hoarder?’ We’re not the most organized, but it’s warm.

1 month ago | mcsweeneys.net | Elaine Szewczyk

Have you ever wanted to use gasoline as lipstick? Or wished someone would start a campfire up your nose? That’s what it feels like to eat the new Pringles Hot Ones. A chance to be transported to the surface of the sun without your shoes on. I don’t usually eat Pringles. But I was recently dumped, and it’s left me with a lot of free time to go to the grocery store with my critical mother. She was raised in Poland during communism. Even her hugs are violent.