Annie Dillard, who died last week, at 81, was a great American writer. I was lucky enough to know her also as a mentor, teacher, and friend. I wrote about our friendship, which began with a fan letter a quarter-century ago, in The New Yorker.

With the paperback launch of The Nimbus right around the corner—October 20, mark your calendar—I’m very happy to be returning to Chicago next weekend for the Printers Row Lit Fest. I’ll be talking to Kathleen Rooney and Ann McGlinn at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 13, on the second floor of Grace Place (637 S. Dearborn).

Louis MacNeice, I Crossed the Minch (via):

When I was nineteen and twenty I was very excited if I walked up a road. Because, like a character in G.K. Chesterton, I expected some adventure round the corner. But now I realize that, contrary to adolescent expectations, adventures are not things which happen at random. The globe-trotter, the flaneur, the wandering dilettante of sensations, these are not the people who get adventures. An adventure must be important to the adventurer. You cannot collect them with scissors and a pot of paste. You must work for them. They must be related to your work and come to you in the course of it. Farewell the castle in the air which never saw hod or trowel.

And now we may need to lie down

“Mass extinction events seem to occur about once every 26 million years…. One theory is that this is the interval between instances of the solar system, rotating around the centre of our galaxy, passing through one of the galactic spiral arms…”

— Nick Wray, LRB Letters (11.20.25)