The Last Book I Loved: The Telling
After what seems like a lifetime of bracing and bottling, I’ve gotten closer to settling my fourth-grade trauma.
...moreAfter what seems like a lifetime of bracing and bottling, I’ve gotten closer to settling my fourth-grade trauma.
...moreI wanted what Ari wanted: affirmation that I could be a good mother while making mistakes and having ugly, difficult thoughts.
...moreI’d been treated for cancer, left my husband, patched things up, and just as life was veering back towards Normalville, it took a headlong swerve.
...moreIs it wrong to have ideas? This is the central question at the heart of Kingfishers.
...moreFirst, a little creative encouragement from Grant Snider to jump start August. Then, in this review, Andrew Fulmer examines Jeff Alessandrelli’s use of the poetic “factoid.” Alessandrelli makes a series of successful allusions in his collection, This Last Time Will Be The First. It is a “contemporarily fresh” collection that deserves our attention, Fulmer argues. And in the latest The Last […]
...moreThe way LTGWS lovingly caressed every carnal description of Manhattan’s byways and alleys, tenement flats, assisted-living towers, and half-way houses was a revelation in today’s post-Minimalist world.
...moreI was only starting to let myself feel what I had lost 14 years earlier, when I had reluctantly placed our third child – the only one I managed to deliver – with an adoptive family. Like Lori Carson, I was love-haunted. Unlike Carson, I had no words.
...moreMichael Chabon’s career is often the work of a writer hell-bent on destroying the line between “literary” and “genre,” and his most famous work is an epic adventure novel about comic-book creators.
...moreI’m quite sure that if I lived when Gertrude Stein did, I would have not enjoyed her person—the pronouncements, the relentless self-promotion, the blatant self-absorption (“I am a genius”). If I lived in her time I probably, like so many else then, would not have enjoyed her writing either—the repetitions, the lack of story, the […]
...moreLittle bits of The Unnamed are stuck in my head. A man clinging to a telephone pole in a flood. A daughter and her father on a bench in Tompkins Square Park. A sense of loss. A sense of isolation.
...moreErnest Hemingway purportedly said of Dawn Powell that she was his “favorite living writer.” Powell’s reputation has dwindled since then, and so I picked up A Time to Be Born in an effort to read more women writers—especially once-famous, forgotten ones.
...moreThe first time I read Allison Benis White’s Small Porcelain Head, I was screening manuscripts for a book prize on my honeymoon. Admittedly, it’s an odd way to celebrate nuptials, but I thought I might read some of the manuscripts during afternoons on the beach. My husband left our room to get us a bottle […]
...more[I]f ever there was a book that should be judged by its cover, it’s this one.
...moreNeither of my parents finished reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. My father abandoned the novel halfway through, pleading boredom, and my mother couldn’t get past the first few chapters due to her infamously weak stomach and a detailed lesson in tiger dangerousness. I, on the other hand, raced through the book as soon as […]
...moreAs a fiction writer, I sometimes get jealous of the storytelling freedom in comics. With prose writing, everyone seems determined to fit stories into predefined boxes. A work must be “literary” or it must be “genre,” it must be “science fiction” or it must be “fantasy,” it must be “serious” or it must be “comedy,” […]
...moreMagic Hours, Tom Bissell’s recent collection of non-fiction, surveys his magazine writing over the last decade or so. It is a genre, he informs us in the Author’s Note, he fell into more or less accidentally; it is also the genre for which he has become best known. “Earlier in my career, I was neurotic […]
...moreAs a lifelong Ozzy fan, I scarfed down his memoir like a stoner polishing off a bag of Doritos. I Am Ozzy turned out to be a pretty good read, at least that’s what I thought. A week after finishing the book I got curious about what other people were saying about it. The reviews […]
...moreI am a voyeur to the core. Keep your house lit at night and I will peer in to see how you spend your time alone, or what colors you’ve painted your walls. Invite me in and I will pick through your bookshelves and look at all your family photos on the mantle while you make me a drink. Ask me to stay and I will rummage through your things for what you’ve been hiding in those closets of yours. Write me a book with characters who are so real and precisely drawn that I can feel their warmth in the seat next to me, and I will sign out of Facebook and devour it.
...moreThree years ago, I bought Rebecca Solnit’s essay collection, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, on a lark. At that time I was beginning to write, trying to find my voice. Three years before that, I had moved from the Midwest to Colorado with the boy I would much later marry. I took […]
...moreThe problem with writing about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is that I can’t discuss the plot. A blend of science fiction and literary narrative, the novel hinges on a secret, a secret so all-encompassing and imposing, so carefully revealed, that if I were to divulge it, I would ruin the book.
That being said, here’s what I can tell you…
...moreWhat would the man who said, “I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph,” think about becoming a museum piece? The quote, by Ken Kesey, appears in the first chapter of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of Kesey and his cohorts’ legendary Day-Glo bus journey across America and the widespread explorations […]
...moreI am here to do two things: scream the praises of James Salter, and throw a few questions about his place in the larger scope of literature into the mix. How did I make it through a college lit class that taught authors from the second half of the twentieth century and never hear of James Salter?
...moreI wanted a genre book. You know, just a quick zip through something exciting, and heavy on plot and action—maybe not so deep with all that poeticism and character development stuff. My first mistake was picking a book by one of those respected genre writers. John le Carré has been around for decades, he’s written […]
...moreEvery high school has a kid like Erik. He’s sharp, dark, and charming. Add in the fact that he has his own car and impeccable taste in Scandinavian metal, and who better to befriend during the darkest years of your life? Even if he seems a little unhinged, or if his customized tabletop war game, complete with rules that revolve around […]
...moreI am as guilty as any other reader I know of opening or hijacking conversations with some derivation of, “You know what you should read?” I can’t help myself; I read something I loved, and I want to share. There is also an unfortunate correlation between how transformative the reading experience was and how vigorously […]
...moreFor years when I was young I would crouch beneath the dinner table to watch my parents drink after-dinner coffee and wine with an ever-changing group of scientists—a tall man from Colombia whose mustache is even more impressive than my father’s, a shy Chinese man who twice brought me folded paper fans, a thin young […]
...moreThere is a passage in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn where Francie Nolan, the book’s protagonist, is described as the sum of many parts. A genetic and experiential palimpsest, Francie:
...moreTruman Capote famously said that what Jack Kerouac did wasn’t writing, but typing. I take just as much offense today to this slander as I did ten years ago as an undergraduate when first hearing it quoted by an English professor.
...moreI had read the book months ago. And then, standing in front of Edward Hopper’s “The House by the Railroad” at the Museum of Modern Art, I found myself trying to explain to a tango-friend from South Africa why this painting—one she wanted to walk past without more than a cursory glance—was important. I wished […]
...moreI was ten years old when 1999 became 2000. My knowledge of the Y2K problem was vague; I could only glean a nebulous mood of panic from overheard newscasts and conversations between adults. My own parents did not seem worried. We went to New Year’s Eve festivities at a family friend’s house. I was part […]
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