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On Sylvia Plath and the Many Shades of Depression
“I am only thirty,” the narrator of Sylvia Plath’s monumental 1962 poem, “Lady Lazarus,” announces early. “And like the cat I have nine times to die.” Like the biblical Lazarus, she has returned from...
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William Kentridge’s Provisional Memory, Provisional Words
Last week, acclaimed South African artist William Kentridge delivered the December 2018 Message from the Library, Brooklyn Public Library (BPL)’s commissioned public lecture series. Past speakers were...
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Stop Trying to Make Pride and Prejudice a Christmas Story
It’s true whether you acknowledge it or not: Pride and Prejudice (1813) isn’t a heartwarming Christmas novel. Sure, the word “Christmas” appears in its pages—six whole times—but the story is hardly...
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Making Dad Jokes is, in Fact, a Neurological Condition
As the holidays approach, families are bracing for the inevitable onslaught of dad jokes. (“What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta.”) But this year, as you roll your eyes upon hearing for the...
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What Happened to the Original Version of The Waste Land?
On 20 Nov 1952, T.S. Eliot’s Harvard friend W.G. Tinckom-Fernandez wrote to Harford Powel: “I like to recall that I introduced him to the poetry of Ezra Pound in College.” TSE’s recollection in On a...
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Presenting Book Marks Best Reviewed Books of 2018
Our beloved fellow books site—Book Marks—spends most of December asking itself a lot of questions: Of the thousands of books published this year, which one received more rave reviews than any other?...
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On Dickens’ Demons and Weird Relationship with Christmas
There was certainly plenty to cause Charles Dickens dismay as he started to plan the Carol in 1843. He had recently visited a ragged school, established in a dilapidated house in the swarming slums of...
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Reading Feminist Futurism in the Age of the “Female” Virtual Assistant
I often think about this joke from Twitter: Women are just better—that’s why our robots are women. Siri, Alexa. All you guys have is a shitbag named Craig with a creepy list. It didn’t make me laugh....
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Toward an Expanded Canon of Black Literature
Nabokov. Faulkner. Steinbeck. Hemingway. Orwell. Heller. Huxley. Fitzgerald. Vonnegut. Dostoevsky. Camus. Milton. As I dragged my finger from title to title, there was something that connected Lolita...
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On the Freaky Foods of Fictional Worlds
Pick a science fiction character. Doesn’t matter where they’re from. Now, tell me what their favorite food is. You can’t think of anything, can you? In most fiction, the characters eat. You might know...
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Marcel Proust Was Almost Impossible to Edit
When Marcel Proust died in November 1922 only The Way by Swann’s, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah had been published; The Prisoner, The Fugitive and...
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The Unexpected Literary Pleasure of Marijuana Reviews
There is a joyful corner of the internet where people don’t argue, trolls don’t troll, and the only kind of self-consciousness is an exploration of consciousness itself: the review sections of...
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An Oddly Poetic Account of Colorblindness from the Turn of the Last Century
The relation of color to light is much the same as that of music to sound. Color has its many hues, its long scales of tints and shades, its true and its false chords. Mere sound gives us but little...
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How Do You Set James Joyce’s Most Famous Story on the Stage?
It’s a touch ironic that the central hook of The Dead, 1904, an immersive theatrical adaptation of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” is a lavish holiday feast. Performed at the wonderfully festive...
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An Unnecessarily Close Reading of That Scene in Portnoy’s Complaint
If you know one thing about Portnoy’s Complaint, it’s probably the thing about the liver. Even if you’ve actually read Roth’s novel (though like me, it may have been years ago), you still might only...
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The Virtue of Giddiness in Art
Giddy. Adjective: Having a sensation of whirling and a tendency to fall or stagger; dizzy. Disorientating and alarming, but exciting. Excitable and frivolous. Verb: Make (someone) feel excited to the...
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A Brief History of Children’s Books: Nasty, Brutish, and Short
Because I like to read, friends were surprised, when I had our daughter, that I read so little to her. The problem wasn’t the reading but the material, which bored both of us. Baby books never involve...
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This Science Fiction Novelist Created a Feminist Language from Scratch
Can a language be designed specifically to express the thoughts and feelings of women? In 1984, the linguist Suzette Haden Elgin wrote a science fiction novel to test this question. The result was...
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How Domesticity is at the Heart of the Novel
A powerful idea took hold in western culture, in the early and mid-20th century, that domesticity was bad for art. It probably began earlier in France, where all the ideas used to begin: there’s...
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John McPhee: Seven Ways of Looking at a Writer
I. The Factual Writer Late last fall, John McPhee—one of the greatest living writers of what is commonly called “creative nonfiction”—released his thirty-third book, The Patch. “I prefer to call it...
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