Quantcast

Posts Tagged: New York Review of Books

Vocabulary Lessons in Bucharest

By

I felt unhinged in my moments of isolation, and frustrated in my muteness.

...more

Literature Tricks or Political Threats?

By

So familiar have the aesthetic conventions of horror become that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish “real” Halloween movies from parodies. Something similar has occurred in our political life. At the New York Review of Books, Christopher Benfey shares a brief history of collisions between humor and horror in Western literature (and American politics).

...more

Into Paradox

By

Over at the New York Review of Books, Peter E. Gordon writes about Søren Kierkegaard’s legacy through the lens of Daphne Hampson’s biography, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique, which she dedicates to S.K. for helping her grasp “with greater clarity why I should not wish to be Christian.”

...more

All That Is Suggested of Trauma

By

At the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates writes about Shirley Jackson through her seminal story “The Lottery,” her contemporaneous public perception via hate mail, the figure of her presented in literary biographies, the self she expressed in essays and works of memoir, her marriage made in hell, her abuse of powerful psychotropic drugs—amounting […]

...more

Sex and Social Media

By

Over at the New York Review of Books, Zoë Heller writes about American Girls by Nancy Jo Sales and Girls and Sex by Peggy Orenstein: how each book deals with the concepts of female “hotness” and body positivity in the social media age—as well as her own critiques of books that may fall within the genre […]

...more
Darryl Pinckney

The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Darryl Pinckney

By

If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away. Ask them to trust you with the truth.

...more

Baldwin’s Paradoxes and Epithets

By

Race was—is—the fundamental American issue, underlying not only all matters of public policy (economic inequality, criminal justice, housing, education) but the very psyche of the nation. Nathaniel Rich, for the New York Review of Books, writes a loving tribute to and overview of the works of James Baldwin: the intellectual as impossible to be pinned […]

...more

Lorrie Moore on Wisconsin and Steven Avery

By

Lorrie Moore writes an extensive ode to her weird home state of Wisconsin, and its newest national sensation, the Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer. The well-acclaimed Wisconsin author’s viewpoint on the series and its setting is interesting, to say the least, and well-deserving of its patented Lorrie Moore Exclamation Points.

...more

Literary Beef: Epistolary Punches Thrown over A Little Life

By

Hanya Yanigihara’s A Little Life has prompted anguished tears from many a reader—and now, is stoking emotional fires (and a few good burns) in a space that doesn’t often feel impassioned heat: the Letters to the Editor section at the New York Review of Books. After a scathing review by Daniel Mendelsohn, Doubleday’s executive editor […]

...more

The Continuing Struggles of Mexican-Americans

By

For many Mexican-Americans, Trump’s campaign is nothing new. It fits within repeating cycles of attraction and rejection for Mexican immigrants in this country and connects with a long history of challenges that citizens of Mexican descent have faced to their place in the society. At the New York Review of Books, Julia Preston discusses the […]

...more

Patti Smith’s “Obsessively Literary” New Memoir

By

Over at the New York Review of Books, Geoffrey O’Brien discusses iconic poet and punk-rocker Patti Smith’s new memoir, M Train: What the book expresses supremely well is the tentativeness of every movement forward, the sense of following a path so risky, so sketchily perceptible, that at any moment one might go astray and never be heard […]

...more