Creative Writing and Research

Browse through databases by topic and find something that sparks an interest!

Find images, encyclopedic information, and scholarship on a wide ranges of subject matter.

Description from their website: "McSweeney’s is a publishing company based in San Francisco.
As well as operating a daily humor website, we also publish Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Believer, and an ever-growing selection of books under various imprints."

Annual anthologies of comics, plays, poetry, short stories, even "nonrequired reading," that earn the title "Best." The series in the library collections are mostly in the Circulation collection, from PS 501 - PS 688.

Find more than 66,000 images from the NYPL that range in topic from menus and famous portraits to manuscripts of Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. A full list of the collections can be found here: http://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/01/05/share-public-domain-collections

Find collections of writers' fiction and poetry, and their non-fiction essays and criticisms from the Library of America series.

A blog about making a career as a writer, with tips on creating an online presence, finding a market for your writing, and publishing your work.

Writer Maria Popova describes her site as "a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why. Mostly, it’s a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually — and an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life." Find interesting tidbits on the writing/reading life of the mind here.