The Millions
-
The Feeling of Finished
Completing a book can be an emotional rollercoaster. If you’ve ever wanted to know how it feels, look no further than The Millions where Claire Cameron has compiled the reactions of a number of authors.
-
Vehicles of Literary Inspiration
For the past century American writers and artists have been obsessed with that shimmering, sexy, liberating, lethal contraption known as the automobile…Is there a more potent metaphor for American restlessness, for the American hunger for status and sex, for the…
-
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty
I never recoiled, in that first season, to hear the nice people on the bus say “beautiful baby,” to us in reverent tones. It’s a thanksgiving for safe passage, a prayer for all new defenseless things. But after a few months…
-
Lydia Davis: A Prolific Tweeter
For The Millions, Adam Boffa compares Lydia Davis’s short stories to social media. He argues that Davis’s compressed language, as well as her emphasis on routine and tragedy, works to “recreate a phenomenon that occurs daily on social media”: Davis’s work, and…
-
A Snapshot of Contemporary Times
For The Millions, Jennifer Rice Epstein reviews New American Stories, an anthology edited by Ben Marcus, and discusses how the collection reflects modern American life.
-
Grief Turned Into Writing
Trauma brought me to the page, it is that simple. It’s a familiar story to hear writers becoming inspired over suffering, but it’s rare to read about it with precision. Over at The Millions, Lidia Yuknavitch writes with startling clarity…
-
“The Labor of Reconsideration”
For the Millions, Philip Graham considers how childhood traumas can inspire art. In his exploration, Graham looks to works by John Gardner, Rabih Alameddine, and James Baldwin, authors who confront “psychic wounds” and use writing as a method of healing: We…
-
Fabricating Truth
For The Millions, Catherine K. Buni revisits the work of Joseph Mitchell to explore “hybrid genres” that meld elements of journalism with other forms. In addition, the essay considers the benefits of “fabricating” the truth in creative nonfiction in order to…
-
An Experimental Novel from Beyond the Grave
Often mentioned in the same breath as works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Ó Cadhain’s novel is, in some ways, even more radically experimental. For starters, all the characters are dead and speaking from inside their coffins… The Millions…
-
Salinger’s “Inscrutable” Text
For The Millions, Christian Kriticos revisits J.D. Salinger’s story “Hapworth 16, 1924,” and tries to place the story within Salinger’s celebrated career. Although the story receives much criticism for its “strange” meandering style, Kriticos claims this structure “follows the contours of…
-
The Emigrants
Can we trust Sebald’s words? It doesn’t matter. The fragmented motifs, repeated images, are scattered throughout the texts and sweep you along to a conclusion, at which there magically appears sense to the whole. Verily, the field has been thoroughly…
-
Daring to Prose
But as Hallberg pointed out, context, not tradition, is what should decide or generate the style of any work of fiction. Chigozie Obioma considers the possibility and audacity of prose from a non-Western point of view in an essay over…