Vocabulary Lessons in Bucharest
I felt unhinged in my moments of isolation, and frustrated in my muteness.
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New York Review of Books
94 posts
Literature Tricks or Political Threats?
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…
Into Paradox
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…
All That Is Suggested of Trauma
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…
Sex and Social Media
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…
Near-Taxidermic Décolleté
What does “modern single woman” even mean anymore? Over at the New York Review of Books, Lorrie Moore investigates the idiosyncratic legacy of Helen Gurley Brown, the once and future…
Digital Ash
Over at the New York Review of Books, Edward Mendelson writes apocalyptically about the way our lives are changing for the worse with the advent of the Internet, smartphones, and…
Countries, Languages, and Writing
But what about those writers who move to another country and do not change language, who continue to write in their mother tongue many years after it has ceased to…
The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Darryl Pinckney
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.
Baldwin’s Paradoxes and Epithets
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…
The Prison House of English
For the NYRB, Tim Parks meditates on writing in English through investigating various authors who made switches from native tongues to the more economically viable lingua franca, like Nabokov and Conrad—or who…
Serendipity in Life and Literature
Be unpredictable, including to yourself. So there’s the question of how do you go about finding things—or better their finding you? You have to be open to surprise and at…