Michelle Dean

Last Saturday, after I posted the Gone Girl essay that turned into another gender-in-literature rant, I thought to myself, “Self, let’s find a new subject, surely your readers are getting bored.…

James Joyce’s most famous works were long, complicated and, depending on who you’re asking, arguably inaccessible novels. But writing to his four-year-old grandson Stephen (yes, that Stephen) in August 1936…

Dorothy Parker died, rather suddenly, of a heart attack in June of 1967. She was seventy-three but had not seemed particularly sick to her friends, who still found her an…

This week brought another spate of bad job-creation news in the United States. This surprised, I think, precisely no one other than pundits, whose job it is to be professionally…

I read awhile back about Angelica Garnett’s death at MobyLives, and I haven’t been able to get her out of my mind since. She was Vanessa Bell’s daughter, Virginia Woolf’s…

I will first shamelessly self-promote and link you to a piece I did for the Awl this week on Joan Didion’s early reviews. I’m going to let that substitute for…

I saw this Paris Review piece about “walking while reading” go up and got all excited. A kindred spirit, I thought. Someone else who knows that the best way to…