In Alexandra Tanner’s ‘Worry,’ Illness Is the Status Quo
In a novel where sisterhood entails constant conflict, illness provides an unexpected emotional salve.
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The Other Boy and the Heron
The heron has a robust mythological history across many cultures, and while the meanings differ, many deal with death, rebirth, and transformation.
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The Virtue of Slow Writers
The slow writer embraces the protracted and unpredictable timeline, seeing it not as fraught or frustrating but an opportunity for openness and discovery.
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At Long Last, a Translation Worthy of ‘Pedro Páramo’
The latest translation of 'Pedro Páramo' is a mystifying work, in the dual sense that it is confounding and that its language possesses an almost mystical quality.
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Tennis Lessons from David Foster Wallace
I was, and still am, the most reviled type of tennis player.
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The Path Is No Path: On Not Becoming a Poet
What makes a poet a poet? There is of course no simple answer. You could argue that self-declaration is enough. You could also argue there must be a measure.
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The Collaborative Alchemy of W.G. Sebald’s Photographs
By rephotographing the material Sebald brought to him, Michael Brandon-Jones played a critical role in helping the writer achieve a tonal consistency between text and image.
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Kelly Link’s Romantic Imagination
Though Link’s stories often keep closer bedfellows with Karen Russell and Aimee Bender, her novel is pulpier and more bathetic, in some ways a piece of straight fantasy.
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Pressure-and-Release: Writing Shanghai’s Rooftoppers
I remember crying the day I made a decision about his character: It seemed clear what needed to happen.
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The Everyday Horror of ‘Other Minds and Other Stories’
In someone else’s hands, these stories might be little more than typeset urban legends, the stuff of 2000s-era AOL email chains, but Sims renders them as something both terrifying and mesmerizing.
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Falling Out of Love with Lyric Poetry
Bang out hundreds of pages of rhyming couplets about something other than your identity or your perceptions, and you, too, will likely fall out of love with lyric poetry.
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The Violent Truths of ‘Brutalities’
The impulse to simplify the complicated nature of touch, argues Margo Steines, is not just an intellectual but an ethical failure.
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YA Isn’t Just for Young Adults
When we have a child or teen at the center of a story, is the categorical difference between YA and adult in the plot, the stakes, or the voice and tone?
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The Truthful Distortions of ‘The MANIAC’
'The MANIAC' is a kind of triptych, presenting us with the conception, painful birth, and exponential growth of the digital computer and its own disquieting offspring, artificial intelligence.
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The Visionary Memoirs of Péter Nádas
'Shimmering Details' is a delicate fusion, supplementing the high-modernist realism of Proust and Musil with an expressionist’s commitment to the distortions generated by strong feeling.
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The Quiet Exhilaration of Reading in Italian
Reading Italian literature submerged me into a kind of intoxication—an explosion of sound and thought.
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