This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreAgent Rob McQuilkin and editor Helen Atsma discuss AFTERPARTIES by Anthony Veasna So.
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreAlexandra Wuest tackles grief, art, and the insights solitude can offer over at Fanzine. For Real Life, Eleanor Penny asks the big questions about and considers the implications of the creation of an artificial womb. Here at The Rumpus, Zoe Fisher recalls finding a radical sanctuary in her local library as a teenager.
...moreShe went on to become a Siberian housewife. He went on to call for the executions of ten million Russians. But she thought back on their evenings drinking and dancing. He sang songs to her in his sweet, high voice. Behind every dictator is a woman who sees something redeemable in him. For n+1, Shawn Wen […]
...moreAt n+1, Dayna Tortorici defends Elena Ferrante’s anonymity against yet another round of exposure, calling the unmaskers out for insensitivity and greed. Tortorici believes it’s all too easy to be distracted from the integrity of the book by the author’s bio and personality. She writes, “Ferrante’s absence keeps things open: ‘Remove that individual [the author] […]
...more“Greif turns the quotidian world over like a miniature globe in his hand, scrutinizing it for false messages, bad faith, and the occasional sign of progress,” writes Daphne Merkin, in The New York Times, of n+1 co-founder Mark Greif’s essay collection, Against Everything. On subjects as diverse Thoreau, exercise, “foodieism,” and the Octomom, Greif’s eye is […]
...moreKristin Dombek’s The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism is just out from FSG, and over at n+1 she writes beguilingly, with humor and aplomb, about narcissists as hollow selves who become genius-tricksters at copying and adopting the brightest parts of the selves of others. Beware! They take what they think […]
...moreThinking about his films while watching an American film leads to a sobering realization: all the things that Kiarostami could not show in his films became the only things Hollywood filmmakers chose to show in theirs. What he showed in his films were the things abandoned by Hollywood: conversation, friendship, understanding, compassion, and empathy. There’s […]
...moreA lurid tale of sexual dishevelment, “Bobby Brown Goes Down” couldn’t get within a hundred miles of US radio but was, Zappa points out with some amusement, “the song to slow dance to in Norwegian discos.” Paul Grimstad provides context for Frank Zappa’s artistic output to accompany the release of the documentary Eat That Question.
...moreHELLO. I was hoping I would run into you on the elevator today. Here, this scene would be perfect for you: A young man takes an orange from the bowl in the kitchen. He sits on the couch in the living room and peels it. He eats the orange. He gets up and puts the […]
...moreIn a darkly humorous new story at n+1, Jen George questions the qualifications of being “adult,” gives thirty-somethings across the world nightmares, and packs in plenty of social criticism while she’s at it. The story, “Guidance/The Party,” follows a single, childless, career-less, 33-year-old woman who is visited by a mysterious Guide. The Guide has been […]
...moreAt n+1, philosopher and writer Justin E.H. Smith remembers Jenny Diski, and shares their correspondence. For Diski, death was always the subject, the knot to admire, wryly, and attempt to untie: …the year before her diagnosis, Jenny invokes the bleak wisdom of Beckett’s line, “Birth was the death of him.” She wonders with Nabokov why […]
...moreAnne Roiphe on respecting writers’ freedom to express the truth of their experiences, while also respecting their subjects’ prerogative to shun them for it.
...moreFor n+1, Nicholas Dame writes about a recent trend in novels: looking back to the 70s.
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