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A Brief History of Queer Language Before Queer Identity
Throughout literary history, queers have had to be smarter than the rest: we’ve had to hide in plain sight. In a literary canon full of straight, white men, it can be a powerful thing to suggest that...
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Yukio Mishima on the Beautiful Death of James Dean
The beautiful should die young, and everyone else should live as long as possible. Unfortunately, 95 percent of people get it backwards, with gorgeous people lingering into their eighties and hideous...
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James Baldwin in Paris: On the Virtuosic Shame of Giovanni’s Room
Early in Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin’s seminal novelistic exploration of queerness, the narrator, David, remembers the first time he held another man’s body close to his own. He has spent a day with...
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The Real Life Castaway Behind Robinson Crusoe Actually Asked to Be Dropped Off
Three hundred years ago this week, a convicted heretic, hustler and ex-spy published a book about a reckless young man washed up on a deserted island. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe presented itself as...
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What I Learned from Keeping a List of Every Book I Read
I don’t keep a diary, but I do save two kinds of reading lists. One in an app is labeled “Books to Read.” It contains hundreds of titles, loosely organized by genres. The other has the titles of all...
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The Ongoing Obsession with Shakespeare’s True Identity
Bear pit. War zone. Mad house. My first serious contact with 21st-century Shakespeare studies was during my doctorate at Monash University. Rumor had it that the Clayton campus was the main recruiting...
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Was Shakespeare Agnostic About the Afterlife?
April 23rd is celebrated worldwide as Shakespeare’s birthday, with people reviving him and his work through performances, sonnet read-a-thons, and even marking the occasion as “Talk Like Shakespeare...
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Amy Tan Reflects on 30 Years Since The Joy Luck Club
I am a realist, not prone to outlandish dreams, and thus, rarely disappointed. Before The Joy Luck Club was published in March 1989, I told my husband that my novel would be on bookstore shelves for...
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The Wild Visionary at the Heart of Early Christianity
Who founded Christianity? The obvious answer, of course, is Jesus Christ, although this is complicated and misleading: “Christ” was not the last name of Jesus! It simply means “the anointed one” in...
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Jane Alison on Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff
Wavelets A North Carolina beach where I sometimes rent a small carousel house in the dunes meets both ocean and inlet: it’s at the bottom tip of an island, where seawater rushes into a bay. Atlantic...
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Culture, Too: The Conference Bringing Critics of Color Together
If you don’t know about Jack Jones Literary Arts, founded by Kima Jones in 2015, you’ll probably at least recognize some of its clientele: Naomi Jackson, Tyehimba Jess, Angie Thomas, Tananarive Due,...
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Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, Young Love, and Old Age
As I near the end of my eighties, I am aware of being in the elegy season. The majority of my close friends from my own generation have departed. I am haunted by many passages in Wallace Stevens, and...
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Heike Geissler’s Grim Account of the Amazon Workplace
Midway through Seasonal Associate, Heike Geissler describes a day off from the Amazon warehouse. It is spent at the Leipzig Christmas market, drinking mulled wine, and then at the fine art museum,...
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Why Are So Many Fictional Teens Entering Cults?
In 1978, more than 900 members of the Peoples Temple, the cult founded by Jim Jones, died by poisoning in a mass murder-suicide in Guyana that eventually became known as the Jonestown Massacre. The...
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Why More People Should Read This Danish Masterpiece
In the summer of 1937, Ernst Bloch, the redoubtable German-Jewish literary critic, utopian humanist, and exile from Nazi persecution, was browsing the paper in his new home of Czechoslovakia when an...
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The CIA Scheme That Brought Doctor Zhivago to The World
In 1956, Sergio D’Angelo made a journey by train from Moscow southwest to the Soviet-made writers’ colony Peredelkino. He was there to meet the rock-star famous writer Boris Pasternak, whose poetry was...
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How Ramona Quimby Helps Kids Make Sense of This Unstable World
Fifty years ago, a five-year-old Oregon girl sang and skipped through her living room, urging her mother onward—though, she protested defiantly, she was not pestering. She was simply unable to contain...
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Let’s All Stop Pigeonholing Sally Rooney as a “Millennial Writer”
You may have heard that Sally Rooney, whose second novel Normal People comes out in the US next week, is “the first great millennial novelist.” If you spend as much time on the internet as any...
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What Do We Really Mean By ‘Women’s Fiction’?
I wrote my novel in a writing group with two forty-something men, faintly guilty that these men’s wives, also writers, were watching the kids instead of joining our meetings (and trying unsuccessfully...
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Svetlana Alexievich in Praise of Maxim Osipov
I love Maxim Osipov’s prose. I started rereading his stories and caught myself thinking that his prose now reads like something of a diagnosis: an accurate, unforgiving diagnosis of Russian life....
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