The Millions
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Elena 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…
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Fates 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.
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One 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…
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Navigating 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…
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When 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.…
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Coming 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…
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Structure 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…
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From 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…
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It 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…
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Ragtime 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…
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Fappetizers
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…
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What 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.