The Millions
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A Bigger Wall
Yesterday, The Millions featured an exclusive “essay” from a certain Republican presidential hopeful about his plan to make Western literature great again: We’re going to take back the Western canon, folks. We are going to build a big beautiful wall…
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To Be or Not to Be (a Father)?
We finally had The Discussion after watching a documentary about Robert McNamara, who, like all Secretaries of State before and after, failed to see the wisdom in preparing for the fall. There were three issues: what I wanted, what she…
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Bad Sex (Scenes)
Are sex scenes in books always bad? At The Millions, Drew Nellis Smith muses on poorly written depictions of passion, why authors so often leave out the messier details, and his own attempts to get it right: I’m no different than anyone…
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An Ode to Literary Jealousy
All these flavors, and Kaulie Lewis chooses to be salty. At The Millions, she gives us an ode to literary jealousy—the regret that one will never be able to claim credit for the great books that have already been written: Truthfully,…
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Creation, Not Comfort
At The Millions, Connor Ferguson muses on writing routines, the tortured artist trope, and the role discomfort plays in the create process: Even if they aren’t trying to be explicitly didactic, most writers feel compelled to create stories, novels, plays,…
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A Woman of the Ear
If Flaubert was ‘a man of the quill,’ then perhaps I am ‘a woman of the ear.’ My interviews aren’t interviews as such. Just talks. We just talk and my role is to listen. Listening was difficult at first because…
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Failing at Gender
An essay by Daniel Harris in the most recent issue of The Antioch Review has sparked a backlash from the transgender community, with many members of the trans community feeling Harris missed the point completely, and worse—wishes they would just…
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The Lexicon of Horror
At The Millions, Madeleine Monson-Rosen explores how the “lexicon of horror” influences novelist Victor LaValle’s thinking about “narrative and language.” In addition, the article discusses how LaValle’s most recent work, The Ballad of Black Tom, draws from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror of Red Hook” for inspiration.
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Pride, Prejudice, and Reality TV
For The Millions, David Busis chats with Curtis Sittenfeld about her recent release Eligible, a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice. In the interview, Sittenfeld discusses the challenges that come up when modernizing older works, and how reality television served…
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A Stand-In for New and Difficult Thinking
Clichés are tempting because they do the work of communicating for us. In a manifesto against workshop jargon, Helen Betya Rubinstein warns us of the dangers of sticking to old models: …because you’d have to remember all the way back…
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Book Cover Showdown
For The Millions, Claire Cameron compares book covers from the United States and United Kingdom in an attempt to develop an “overarching theory” and explain how cultures “divide.”
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Relying on Memory
For The Millions, Antonio Ruiz-Camacho interviews novelist Karan Mahajan about the origins of his recently released novel The Association of Small Bombs. The two also discuss how moving from New Delhi to America shaped Mahajan’s writing: It gave me a sense of freedom in my writing. I had a private…