New York Times
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Pregnant Words
In the New York Times, Rachel Cusk takes on two new memoirs about infertility and the quest for motherhood to explore the wholly compelling “half-analogy between the writing student and the woman embarking on in vitro fertilization.” Julia Leigh’s Avalanche relates six years of…
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The Beats Come to Paris (Again)
The French obsession with America popular culture takes form at the Pompidou Center in Paris with relics from the Beat Generation, including the famous 120-foot scroll of Kerouac’s On the Road, in a comprehensive exhibit. Frank Rose reports the details for the New York Times.
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Braving the Cold
As both a storyteller and a stylist, Braverman is remarkably skilled, with a keen sense of visceral detail … that borders on sublime. Over at the New York Times, Bronwen Dickey has written a powerful review of Blair Braverman’s debut…
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Franchise Exploitation
Harry Potter fans are celebrating the release of J.K Rowling’s newest work, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the eighth installment in the Harry Potter series. However, unlike the other novels in the series, Cursed Child is the script of…
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Pondering Pond
At the New York Times, Meghan O’Rourke reviews Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel, Pond, calling it “one of those books so odd and vivid that they make your own life feel strangely remote.” (And check out Nina Schuyler’s review of Pond right…
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Is This It?
When a writer has said all that he or she has to say, or as much as possible before mortality intercedes, the body of work remains incomplete no matter the size of the output. The taunt persists: That’s it? At…
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To Reconcile Music and Ethics
If you want to change the world, why write poetry? Wayne Koestenbaum, writing for the New York Times, takes a moment to appreciate Adrienne Rich’s body of work via the recently released Collected Poems, focusing on Rich’s ability to sing…
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Literary Layers
In her review of Cynthia Ozick’s new essay collection, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays, Zoe Heller quotes Ozick quoting Lionel Trilling in reference to Jonathan Franzen’s commercial-literary ambition: “a writer must ‘direct his words to his spiritual ancestors,…
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This Year You Will Finally Read Ulysses
You don’t like to quit, but need a nudge to wade back into the novel’s overflowing streams of character consciousness, arcane references and shifting structure to follow those people going about life in Dublin on June 16, 1904. Yes, another…
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The Case for Opera
In a piece on a new production of Mozart’s “Abduction from the Seraglio,” the New York Times makes a case for this old art form’s role as an agent of change in our tumultuous cultural reality: For centuries, opera has been a…
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Wish List for More
Alice Gregory and Thomas Mallon request sequels in the New York Times Bookends column. After sifting through some recent, popular marriage novels like Fates and Furies and Gone Girl, Gregory declares her allegiance to Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge and…