This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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Posts Tagged: The Millions
This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreThis Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreThis Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...more
Digging for Characters: A Conversation with Sonya Chung
Sonya Chung discusses her latest novel The Loved Ones, the mental space required to wander around fictional worlds, and looking back at her childhood.
...moreInheriting Trauma
At The Millions, former Rumpus Managing Editor Zoë Ruiz pens a beautiful piece on how trauma is passed from generation to generation.
...moreAziz Nesin’s Ghost
This week, the Turkish government has jailed a prominent politician who is referred to fondly as “Kurdish Obama” and shutdown Cumhuriyet, a popular newspaper. Amid these distressing developments, Kaya Genç looks towards books and history in her profile of 20th century Turkish humorist Aziz Nesin at The Millions. Nesin, who Genç compares to Christopher Hitchens and […]
...moreA “Girl” and Her Mother
At The Millions, Naa Baako Ako-Adjei discusses reading Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” through the lens of her relationship with her own mother growing up, and her new understanding of the story fifteen years later: In my rereading of “Girl,” I also realized that I never noticed how transgressive the story is. The mother’s liturgy about behaving […]
...moreRunning with Ears
Derek Teslik tackles the importance of running for an author—and listening to Joyce audiobooks while doing so—in an essay over at The Millions: So, for this last run, I wanted to up the mental game somehow, maybe simulate the brutality of the last six miles without running them. What better way to test my fortitude than […]
...moreElena Ferrante and the Picture on the Back Cover
Essayist Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s obsession with author photos leads to authorial reflections on gender, representation, and what writers owe the public in “Occupy Author Photo: On Elena Ferrante, Privacy, and Women Writers” at The Millions. Starting with her own experiences and branching out to Mary Oliver, Sarah Howe, and eventually Elena Ferrante, she calls for […]
...moreFates and Hashtags
What would the main characters from Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies be like on Twitter? At The Millions, Claire Cameron imagines what sort of missives Lotto and Mathilde Satterwhite would tweet out into the void.
...moreOne More Time
At The Millions, Shivani Radhakrishnan reviews Mauro Javier Cardenas’s novel The Revolutionaries Try Again, which takes a Soviet Montage-esque approach to budding and dissipating revolutionary impulses: You’re never directly informed about what counts as revolution and who in particular is trying to achieve it. Instead, The Revolutionaries Try Again dissects a decade of Ecuadorian austerity […]
...moreNavigating French
Over at The Millions, Hannah Gersen interviews Lauren Collins about her memoir, When in French; learning a foreign language; and writing about herself. As Collins recalls: I wanted to describe the terrain of French, the kind of landscape and its physical features and its hills and valleys. I was thinking of it that way. To […]
...moreWhen 2 Become 1
One day I went to work on my novel and, to my surprise, a part of it had been rewritten. My boyfriend, seeing my unease, told me that he had done it, that he thought I needed to be funnier. “But it’s mine,” I told him. “My work.” He looked at me, hurt. “Aren’t we […]
...moreComing Home to Proust
At The Millions, J.P. Smith describes the singular effect that Marcel Proust has had on his growth as a writer: This isn’t a rambling, stream-of-consciousness book of memories lost and found; it’s a novel with a subtle and solid architecture, where in its last volume, Time Regained, the shape of the work comes finally into focus.
...moreStructure as Lightning Rod
Writing for The Millions, M.C. Mah turns over all the cards in the deck on structure in storytelling. He gathers words of wisdom—and many metaphors—from luminaries like John McPhee, Borges, Vonnegut, and George Saunders, and then links the contemporary “horoscopic style” of structuring to an “anxiety about a better way to tell a story…” possibly […]
...moreFrom Reading to Reading
Over at The Millions, Alex Lockwood shares what he learned from reading and readings during his first American book tour: I packed The Wave in the Mind into my luggage as I set out from Britain for North America. Not least because I’d be visiting Portland, Ore., Le Guin’s home city; and not only because […]
...moreIt Was a Joke
In an essay on author authenticity for The Millions, Alcy Levy examines Percival Everett’s satirical novel Erasure—about a black author whose own satirical novel is taken seriously—in light of recent literary identity shake-ups such as James Frey and Michael Derrick Hudson, who changed his name to Yi-Fen Chou to get a poem published: This exposes a major […]
...moreRagtime and the Mysterious Teenage Highlighter
At The Millions, Jacob Lambert shares a letter written to an unknown teenager who annotated and “ruined” his secondhand copy of Ragtime. Lambert expresses bewilderment over the passages that the teenager highlighted, and provides his own insights in response: Chapter three ends with the sentence “And up through the slum alleys, through the gray clothes hanging listlessly […]
...moreFappetizers
When does food porn become a problem? For The Millions, Davey Davis looks at the spread of the pornographic sensibility to Instagram cuisine: The cumshot is replicated in Instagram food porn, not with the actual consumption of the food but rather its literal destruction by human hands. With these hands, croissants are torn apart, sandwiches split […]
...moreWhat Not to Wear
For The Millions, Rosa Lyster analyzes the “dos and don’ts” of writing about clothes, arguing that strong descriptions of clothing can help enliven a narrative and provide clues about a character’s tastes and class.
...morePrivate Belief vs. Public Art
For The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone explores Eyewear Publishing’s new anthology, The Poet’s Quest for God, and explains why poets “need God”: How do we discern a writer’s religious beliefs? When does the private belief inform the public art? When it comes to political views of writers, we prod and we conjecture with pleasure. When it comes to […]
...moreA Brief Relationship with Writing
At The Millions, Bryan VanDyke reflects on his experience writing several unpublished novels, and how these manuscripts helped motivate him to write the draft of his first published work in less than a week: My grad school mentor, the brooding and kind-hearted author David Plante, would sometimes refer to unsuccessful books as “one more for the […]
...moreThe Existential Crises of Writers
Writers experience all sorts of anxieties and doubts, such that many find themselves taking a spiraling descent into the worst existential crises. No writer should feel alone in this—over at The Millions, Robert Fay writes about the many writers who have fought the long hard battle against nihilism in their writing careers.
...moreHow to Write Wilderness
At The Millions, Mary Catherine Martin responds to the flaws she found in Dave Eggers’s representation of the Alaskan wilderness in his most recent novel, Heroes of the Frontier. She explains why writers who “write wilderness” have a responsibility to understand the great outdoors before putting pen to paper: If there’s anything wilderness can teach you, […]
...morePortman’s Pen Pals
Apparently, Jonathan Safran Foer wasn’t the only one exchanging emails with Natalie Portman. At The Millions, Jacob Lambert shares excerpts from the supposed epistolary relationship between the actress and no less than American author Cormac McCarthy.
...moreComputer Programs Make Good Writing Buddies
For The Millions, Philip Hopkins shares what he learned after attempting to co-author a book with a computer program. Through the experience, Hopkins ultimately concludes that “the gap between simple self-awareness and the literary intelligence necessary to compose a worthwhile novel will always be vast.”
...moreWild Water Kingdom
If anything, the private spaces of the Monterey Bay Aquarium are even more magical that the public ones. The exact same aesthetic sensibility that pervades the viewing galleries—clean, calm, scientifically sound, technologically advanced—also characterizes the service corridors, which is nice because it appeals to my sense of symmetry. But does it actually matter? Does it […]
...moreThe Desire for Distraction
For The Millions, Mike Broida revisits David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, arguing that the work’s claims about addiction and the media presaged the influence of “television culture” on the digital age: The final “joke” of Infinite Jest is that the book is intended to be almost as endless and mirthful as the addictions it depicts. To miss the desperate worshipping hidden […]
...moreWriters Who Burn Their Own Work
We burn old love letters and photographs to be reborn. The action of burning is often a process. Find a match or a lighter. Put the papers in a container or can or shove them in a fireplace. There are so many moments along the way when we can have second thoughts, when we can […]
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