laura miller
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Where Writers Rule
At Slate, Laura Miller discusses the TV showrunner as novelist, focusing specifically on Noah Hawley. Hawley, showrunner for the FX show Fargo, has also published multiple novels, including Before the Fall: By contrast, the flawed, struggling, conflicted male characters in both…
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The Dreamer Gazing
Using examples like John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim Progress and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Laura Miller analyzes our modern concept of what an “allegory” is, in comparison to how the word has historically been used to describe literature, and how…
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Rooted Elsewhere
Most of the rest of the stories in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours are linked, with major characters in one story later turning up as minor characters in another. This loose, multiracial, polymorphously perverse, generation-spanning cast lives mostly in present-day England,…
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No New Friends
A connection so fundamentally optional doesn’t provide the same ambivalence and tension you get with alcoholic parents, narcissistic spouses, or resentful bosses. If your friend abuses you or your trust, you can just walk away. Slate’s Laura Miller explains why…
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Fan Fiction Gone Wild
Slate’s Laura Miller details the bizarre tale of the copyright lawsuit between two No. 1 New York Times best-selling fantasy authors, showing the potential messiness of fan fiction going mainstream: If these tropes sound familiar to you, you’re not alone.…
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Exhausted, Frustrated, Probably Depressed
The housewife is to the novelist what the still life is to the painter. For the Slate Book Review, Laura Miller writes a piece exploring the history and resurgence of a beloved literary archetype: the housewife, often made profound by great…
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Writing on Old Age
For Slate, Laura Miller reviews the way old age is explored and rendered through literature, especially by those of old age themselves: The essays in Alive, Alive Oh! resolve in a stubbornly untidy fashion; Athill rejects the unspoken, oppressively conventional “wisdom”…
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The Complexities of Litchat
Laura Miller writes in the New Yorker about litchat and legacy: In fact, litchat has assumed an ever-greater role in criticism because so much of what once happened privately and fleetingly is now public and preserved. Social-media platforms like Facebook…
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Word of the Day: Miasma
(n.); noxious exhalations from putrid organic matter; poisonous effluvia or germs polluting the atmosphere; a dangerous, foreboding, or deathlike influence or atmosphere “If the Internet is a bridge to the greater world, a troll is the beast who lives under…
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If It Quacks like a Dragon
Kazuo Ishiguro insists his new novel, The Buried Giant, is not a fantasy novel. Laura Miller at Salon agrees. Ursula K. Le Guin does not (and is a little insulted). David Barnett at The Guardian doesn’t care either way and…
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Between the Lines
While some bibliophiles hold books as sacred artworks to be carefully preserved, others can’t read without a little back-and-forth. Laura Miller makes a case for defacing pages: Marginalia is a blow struck against the idea that reading is a one-way…