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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...

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The 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...

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A 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....

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A 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...

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How 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...

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The 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...

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On 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...

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Rituals 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...

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Gabriel 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...

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Why 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...

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The 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...

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A 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...

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On 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...

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Grendel 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...

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In 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...

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On 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....

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Finding 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...

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In 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....

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Winning 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...

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Hisham 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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