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We All Contain Multitudes of Tacky
Ever droll, Sadie Stein writes in the Paris Review about the reaction we’re (all) prone to have when people recommend literature based on our professed likes and dislikes: When someone says I will like something, I tend to assume the something in question will be precious, tedious, and often aggressively eccentric. Sometimes I do like these things, which is…
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Licking Vladimir’s Stamps
It may seem a little outdated to invoke Vera Nabokov’s name, but most writers seem to agree on the need for a “Vera”—a partner or friend, willing to edit and support. In the Atlantic this week, Koa Beck explores the legend of the do-it-all spouse.
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The Great G.A.N.
Does the “Great American Novel” actually exist—or is it just the name of a book by Philip Roth? Over at the New Yorker, you can read Adam Gopnik’s review of The Dream of the Great American Novel by Laurence Buell, and you can also listen to Elizabeth Gilbert, Adam Gopnik and Sasha Weiss discuss what the term has evolved…
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Devout Apostrophes
This week, the Paris Review has a really beautiful interview up with the poet Mary Szybist. She talks about religion, Wallace Stevens and her abiding love for the apostrophe: I have always been attracted to apostrophe, perhaps because of its resemblance to prayer. A voice reaches out to something beyond itself that cannot answer it. I find that moving in part because…
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The Microphone on the Radio Tower
Marina Keegan died in a car accident just five days after she graduated from Yale University. But her writing lives on, and lends an empathetic voice to the often tedious discussions of millennials. From her posthumous essay, “Song for the special,” in Salon: Every generation thinks it’s special — my grandparents because they remember World War…
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The Personal Becomes Public
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s magnum-opus, My Struggle, is an unflinching and exhaustive chronicle of a modern life. Interviews with the Norwegian writer are equally as vulnerable and exacting: It is too late to shield himself. For all the success of My Struggle, Knausgaard speaks of its impact with more regret than pride. Sitting in his rustic studio across the yard…
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Cabin in the Woods
It may not be 1869 anymore, but fear not: the golden age of conservation literature is far from over. As part of the Pacific Standard‘s week-long series on “opting-out,” Eva Holland writes about the tradition of environmental writing, from Thoreau to David Gessner. Also in the series: a patriarchal cult in Alaska, homesteading, and the “new domesticity.”
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What Would Lynne Tillman Do?
It is nearly impossible to live in New York City without feeling a flicker of Lynne Tillman’s exacting presence. Over at the New Yorker, the indomitable Colm Toibin writes about the (equally) indomitable Lynne Tillman in the introduction to What Would Lynne Tillman Do?: Essays. Lynne Tillman’s essays, and indeed the interviews she has given and…
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Go Tell It on the iPhone
Praise the writer’s notebook, and praise the evolution of the writer’s notebook. Over at the New Yorker, Casey Cep writes about archiving the daily details digitally in photographs, rather than on paper: Photography engenders a new kind of ekphrasis, especially when the writer herself is the photographer. That is why I have found myself so willing to…
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith Crack Each Other Up
Two weeks ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith sat down at the Schomburg Center to chat about Adichie’s glorious novel, Americanah (and literature, race, gender, and love!). Their conversation was smart and incisive, with a lot of laughing—but if you missed it, you can watch the talk here.
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“Yes. Of course. But yet. Anyway.”
Harper’s Magazine interviews Leslie Jamison about her debut, home-run collection of essays, The Empathy Exams: Essays. On the complications (and yet! necessity) of empathy, Jamison writes: So there’s a lot of danger attached to empathy: it might be self-serving or self-absorbed; it might lead our moral reasoning astray, or supplant moral reasoning entirely. (See this fantastic piece by Paul Bloom…
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The Treasures in Union Square
If you are among those who fantasize about secret messages in the public world—love letters in Burger King wrappers and Narnia entrances in gym lockers—then geocaching, or at least an essay about geocaching, might be just for you. Matthew Fishbane writes in The Boston Review on the ways that geogaching makes him see things he otherwise might…