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When a Stranger Showed Up in Our Home
Early on in Ali Smith’s coruscating There but for The (2011), in post-coital badinage, two characters mockingly debate the essence of 21st-century journalism. One character sums up the style, content...
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On the Adventuresome Dane Who Drove Across North Africa in the 1930s
The art of translation requires an element of unpredictability. Although in my twenties I made my living translating poetry and novels from French and Italian into English, it never became a real job...
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Passing for White: A Literary History
In Nella Larsen’s day, the theme of passing had been an obsession of American popular literature, of American culture and politics, since the mid-19th century. In most of the fiction by white men...
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Life Got You Down? Time to Read The Master and Margarita
‘“And what is your particular field of work?” asked Berlioz. “I specialize in black magic.”’ If many Russian classics are dark and deep and full of the horrors of the blackness of the human soul (or,...
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Why America’s Best Political Novelist Is Required Reading in 2018
When Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed, I imagine that I was one of many women who regretted that I couldn’t join the protests in Washington, D.C. In a strange way, I wanted to get arrested, as if only...
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Amy Bloom on the Legacy of Thom Jones
“The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.” “Just remember, once you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed.” —From Thom’s favorite guy: Schopenhauer Thom Jones’s lies—his...
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The Masters of Mining Adolescent Experience in Fiction
I don’t know when my belief in child-brand magic came to an end, but I acutely remember those years of rich imagination. One of my favorite movies during my childhood was the 1996 film adaptation of...
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The Vulnerable Private Writings of Ernest Hemingway
I can trace my passion for Hemingway to a sweltering July afternoon in Key West in the 1970s. My husband and I were there with a couple of friends who were eloping. We were the sole witnesses to the...
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The Psychiatrist Who Tried To Save Sylvia Plath
With the imminent publication of The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2, there will be considerable discussion about 14 letters written by Plath to Ruth Barnhouse, her psychiatrist, mostly because they...
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The Year I Stopped Reading White People
The year I turned 25, I had a bit of an identity crisis. My family and I emigrated from the Philippines to the States when I was 12 years old, which made 25 the year that I’d lived more of my life here...
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A Brief History of Sci-Fi’s Love Affair With the Red Planet
The first fiction about Mars arose from speculation about its moons. Although Mars was one of five planets known to the ancients (along with Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn) nothing was known about...
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On the Very Scary Rise of the First Literary Vampire
On 17 June 1816, John William Polidori recorded in his diary that “The ghost stories are begun by all but me.” Polidori was Lord Byron’s physician and had accompanied the poet and hypochondriac to...
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How Many Ways Can Men Say “Not All Men”?
Very few people seem to find anything offensive about the presumption that feminism is a cover for “misandry.” The stereotype of the man-hating, ball-breaking scold is so deeply entrenched in cultural...
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The Souls of Latarian Milton
Been thinking a little bit. Remembering the homeboy at the literary conference. Ripped, dread-head, heart-pump-diesel looking brother, call himself a poet. Posturing, all sorry-not-sorry, in a red tee...
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Why Contemporary Art (and Literature) Needs More Sarcastic Critics
One important cog of Contemporary Art—I would even call it fundamental—is the militant Enemy of Contemporary Art, who argues and rants against the fraud perpetrated by these bums who have become...
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Searching for Graham Greene’s Havana
It’s only when I re-read Our Man in Havana that I realized I shared a street with the hapless spy hero of Graham Greene’s novel. My own office was in a grand trading exchange in the old city that dated...
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The Radical Moralist: On Lionel Trilling’s Literary Criticism
It is rare for a literary critic to remain alive for readers decades after his death—even rarer than for a novelist or a poet. Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) belonged to what Randall Jarrell called “the...
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Literary Hoax is the Most Underappreciated Genre
It was out of love, or rather the desire to be loved, that led the 19 year-old William Henry Ireland to forge the “lost” Shakespeare play Vortigern and Rowena in 1796, not to fool the critics or reap...
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How Much Did James Joyce Base “The Dead” on His Own Family?
When James Joyce wrote the “The Dead,” which eventually became the last story in Dubliners, it was as though he sought to resurrect those whom he had buried with mockery and distancing in an earlier...
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The Zombies of Karl Marx: Horror in Capitalism’s Wake
“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” claimed Karl Marx in Capital, his multi-volume magnum opus. Elsewhere in...
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