Posts by author
Kirstin Allio
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Ordinary Days of Grandeur
Don’t miss the weekly staff picks over at the Paris Review. Lorin Stein recommends Brenda Shaughnessy’s soulful and stripped down So Much Synth, Jeffery Gleaves praises “mother writer” Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors, and Caitlin Youngquist writes of Bernadette Mayer’s Works…
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All Girls All the Time
There have been an awful lot of girls in titles lately—The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, to name a few—writes Alexandra Alter in the New York Times. But popular, formulaic titles aside, some “girl”…
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The Sacred and the Profane in Knausgaard
Is it possible to separate Knausgaard the author from Knausgaard the protagonist? At the New Republic, Tess Crain asks this question, taking a look at the series from a woman’s point of view. By her estimation, Volume 5, just out…
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Unforbidden but Still Hidden
Psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips talks with his editor, Ileene Smith, about unforbidden pleasures and his new book of the same title at FSG’s Works in Progress. Phillips respectfully declines Freud’s narrow of view of the origins of desire, pleasure,…
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The Universal Truth of the Body
At Guernica, Jennifer Sears talks to Mary Gaitskill about her recent novel, The Mare, emotional accessibility, love that crosses social norms, and the challenges—technical and empathic—of developing a characters very different from herself. Gaitksill credits the body, her own, for…
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Lost in Translation
There is such a stark cognitive dissonance at present—Black writers winning prestigious literary awards and facing watermelon jokes in the same moment, White editors wanting racial diversity while still publishing racist poems. With an introduction by new Editor-in-Chief Chanda Prescod-Weinstein,…
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No Pronouns
Using Anne Garréta’s 1986 novel, Sphinx, as a springboard, Stephanie Hayes explores the superpowers of gender-blank characters for the Atlantic. Sphinx’s recent translator, Emma Ramadan, describes how what began as an Oulipan constraint to avoid gender became a freedom from preconceived…
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Writing Motherhood
…motherhood is an undiscovered country in the literary sense, one we must venture into lest our experience goes unrecorded, or recorded only by men. At the New York Times, Sarah Ruhl reviews Rivka Galchen’s new collection of essays, Little Labors, and…
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Reading Writing
A delightful, short essay at Atlas Obscura describes how handwriting in colonial America was packed with information about the profession, or trade, and class of the penman/woman. Reading was considered spiritual, and taught separately from writing, which was highly self-conscious, revealing,…
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I Wanted to Be Seen
Check out highlights from a conversation between Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard at the Chicago Review of Books that range from the question of whether real literature must “burn” to be written, to why there’s no therapy in My…
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Measuring Emotion
At Lit Hub, a former student talks with Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, about expressions of emotion in personal essays and why “confession and sentimentality [are] taboo.” For Jamison, the investigation of writing emotion began in her MFA…
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Bound/Unbound
Edie Meidav interviews writer-activist Quintan Ana Wikswo for Conjunctions on her novel of text and image, The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far (Coffee House), and her unusual biography. The conversation ranges from Wikswo’s childhood spent mostly alone…