Note: The immediately unfortunate reality is that some of the links below may lead to paywalls; nevertheless, I have included them for those with the ability and the desire to scale those walls (from which we at Lazuli derive no monetary benefit). The links below will be updated from time to time--the newest ones being found at the top--so feel free to check back periodically. Happy reading!

Shades of Greene by Zadie Smith (The Guardian, Sept 2004)

Though the prose stylings of Graham Greene himself are not to my aesthetic tastes, this long-form essay by Zadie Smith is. Smith articulates Greene's deft employment of "ethical realism" and defends his genre-bending integration of journalism into the fictional form.

Simplicity or style?: what makes a sentence a masterpiece? by Jenny Davidson (Aeon, Aug 2016)

This article contains some of my favorite descriptions of beautiful writing (and it is, itself, beautifully written):

"A great sentence makes you want to chew it over slowly in your mouth the first time you read it. A great sentence compels you to rehearse it again in your mind’s ear, and then again later on. A sentence must have a certain distinction of style – the words come in an order that couldn’t have been assembled by any other writer..."

"If we think of a library as a city and a book as an individual house in that city, each sentence becomes one tiny component of that house. Some are mostly functional – the load-bearing wall, the grout between the bathroom tiles – while others are the details we remember and take away, perhaps recalling their texture and colour when we assemble our own verbal dwelling-place."