On the Upstart NYC Alt Weekly That Gave Us Armond White
Around 1995, the NYPress had finally earned a growing reputation as a viable, cranky, smart and cynical alternative to that dusty and self-righteous The Village Voice. You never knew what you were...
View ArticleThe Best War Narratives Go Beyond Brute Force
Way back in the 20th century, the world was filled with gender stereotyping, most of which turned out to be nonsense. Women can’t play chess? When Judit Polgár and her sisters starting beating...
View ArticleA Brief (But Not Too) History of Literary Constipation
This is a constipated time. I mean that not literally—although “quarantine constipation” is, apparently, a real affliction—but metaphorically: it is hard (pun) to get more static than self-isolation....
View ArticleA Conversion of Suffering: At the Intersection of Poetry and Psychoanalysis...
It is dangerous for a psychoanalyst to write about poetry, like inviting you to watch me fall into Freudian clichés, interpreting a poem away. Dangerous, like taking on a poet who comes to my...
View ArticleHow Halldór Laxness Brings the Heroic to the Everyday
In the spring of 1927, the Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness had reached a crisis point in his young life. He had begun his journey as a writer in Reykjavik in 1919, making his debut at just seventeen...
View ArticleThe Delight of Daniel Mendelsohn
A stranger. A voyage. A return. Fathers and sons. Shipwreck and temptation. Hiddenness and unveiling. Detour upon detour. The stuff of a million stories, whether quest or exile, that wend and spiral...
View ArticleOn the Unexpected Hopefulness of Don DeLillo’s The Silence
My fiancée told me there would soon be nothing new to watch. Nothing new for shows and movies, she meant, because of pauses in filming for quarantine. She said this after we’d scraped ourselves from...
View ArticleRituals of Housekeeping, Memories of Home: On Marilynne Robinson’s First Novel
In one of my earliest memories I am standing on a beach with my father and we are sculpting the shape of a woman’s body out of sand. In my mind it is winter—Avalon in the off-season—and I see us...
View ArticleGabriel García Márquez: On Taking Writers at Their Word
A literature teacher warned the youngest daughter of a great friend of mine last year that her final exam would be on One Hundred Years of Solitude. The girl was frightened, with every reason, not only...
View ArticleWhy Are Female Stutterers Such a Rarity in Literature?
Despite my inclination for critical detachment, I admit there are some books I can’t help but take personally. As a person who stutters, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is one of those books. I first...
View ArticleThe Twisted Dream of Home Ownership in Tana French’s Novels
In the Irish mystery novel Broken Harbor, by the American expat writer Tana French, a detective arrives at the scene of a triple murder and steps into what feels like a real-estate ad. Other than a...
View ArticleA World Beyond Our Skin: Jenny Erpenbeck and the Potential of Fiction
When the Berlin Wall fell, Jenny Erpenbeck was sleeping. “I spent that evening with friends,” the acclaimed German writer remembers in an essay from Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces (translated by Kurt...
View ArticleOn Bafflement: Reflections on Marilynne Robinson and the Theology of...
When we perceive the obvious from even the slightest of skews, we see that it is, in fact, issuing a request. For? Generosity is one way to put it. Radical openness is another. A sort of simmering...
View ArticleGrendel at 50: How John Gardner’s Finest Novel Undermines His Ideas About...
Not long ago, an acquaintance on Twitter asked for recommendations of lesser-read classics, which he defined as “anything published fifty years ago or more.” Unable to resist any occasion for a book...
View ArticleIn Praise of the Realistic Hope of Jonathan Franzen’s Endings
I’m almost sure I got my job at Lit Hub because, in my first interview, I offered my hottest Jonathan Franzen take: his books are very fun to read. In the three years since I blew the minds of no fewer...
View ArticleOn Finally Being Old Enough to Love Proust
The other day, walking by the high school near my house, I came upon a teenage boy throwing a javelin, and, as I watched him practice, a thing happened that I’ve lately noticed happening more and more....
View ArticleFinding Literary Spaces Amid the Intensity of New Motherhood
In the year and odd months since I gave birth to my first baby, in the early days of 2020s panic and isolation, I read books at a breakneck speed. I unsubscribed from every podcast that reported the...
View ArticleIn Celebration of Laurie Colwin’s Lost Manhattan
Featured photo by Nancy Crampton Back in the 1980s, when I lived far away from family and friends, one of my lifelines was a subscription to Gourmet magazine, in which I discovered a singular voice....
View ArticleWinning the Game You Didn’t Even Want to Play: On Sally Rooney and the...
Sally Rooney is unhappy. Sally Rooney has everything and Sally Rooney is unhappy. Sally Rooney is unhappy because Sally Rooney has everything. If literary careers are like games, and they are, then...
View ArticleHisham Matar on the Migratory Fictions of Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was not a man who came at things directly. Nearly every story he wrote was rendered through a filter. He had a passion for subjectivity, for the half visible detail. He was fascinated by...
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