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Ali Smith on the Prescient Genius of J.G. Ballard
“There’s something about the novel that resists innovation,” J.G. Ballard said. He said it more than once; it was something he was fond of saying even as he himself innovated, working away beneath and...
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Our Favorite Literary Hub Stories from 2017
Emily Temple, Senior Editor Rereading Mrs. Dalloway at the Same Age as Mrs. Dalloway, Carole Burns Every love affair with a novel is personal. And like Burns, I read and reread the books that move me,...
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Haunted by the Ghosts of Henry James and Jean Rhys
I’m sometimes wary of the part of myself that is defiantly antifactual, jonesing for the next hit of mystery, willing to do anything to get it. This version of myself resembles the master miniaturist...
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J.M. Coetzee: Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett
One. As Hugh Kenner explained to us long ago in his essay “The Cartesian Centaur,” Samuel Beckett is a philosophical dualist. Specifically, Beckett writes as if he believes that we are made up of, that...
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Mothers, Daughters, Lovers: On the Groundbreaking Art of Kathleen Collins
1. In many ways, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? isn’t about interracial love at all. A collection of revelatory, lyrical yet plot-driven pieces of short fiction, it happens to include insights...
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Want to Hear a Dirty Joke? Get a Woman to Tell It
In the past few weeks, flinching in horror at each new revelation about sexual harassment, I realized how much all of us owe female comics, especially those who have insisted on their right to work...
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Hot Sex With Sea Monsters: A Comparative Study
In the fall of 2017, somewhat improbably (so on brand for 2017), we were treated to two (2) much-lauded, darkly comic works of art in which a South American water monster, looking suspiciously like a...
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Surviving 2017 with Borges: On the Art of Wonder and Wonder of Art
In an essay from 1941 on H.G. Wells and Nazism, Jorge Luis Borges expressed surprise that the English writer who had fictively sent worlds to war was not a Nazi. “Wells, incredibly, is not a Nazi,”...
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Good Writers Borrow, Great Writers Remix
This morning I took my cup of coffee and laptop to a desk to work on an old short story I’ve been kicking around when I made the greatest mistake any writer can make: I opened Facebook. Between posts...
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The Literature of Bad Sex
In a roiling climate of grievances and exhumed pain, at the end of a dull and lurid year, something astonishing happened. After the unmasking of Weinstein and amid the whole sorry cavalcade of...
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How to Read Caves
When I was a kid, I went on a class trip to Moaning Cavern in the Gold Country of California. Moaning Cavern. The name was horrifying: the sense that this place moaned, that it had a voice. We had to...
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In California, Visions of Defiance and Grace
When I started this column a few weeks after Donald Trump had been elected our 45th President, I knew that something had gone drastically wrong with our politics, but I couldn’t then grasp how this...
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Same As It Ever Was: Orientalism Forty Years Later
“Why do they have to show that? That—that—violence,” I said to my mom hours later, burying my face in my pillow, unable to sleep, my little body convulsing with this strange grief. In the packed dark...
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Barbara Comyns, Outsider Artist
In the 2005 movie Junebug, Madeline, a Chicago art dealer travels to her husband’s home in rural North Carolina to secure the singular work of a self-taught painter. The artist is an old man who speaks...
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The Hunter and His Gun: An American Myth That Just Won’t Die
Seventy-four percent of gun owners in the United States are male, and 82 percent of gun owners are white, which means that 61 percent of all adults who own guns are white men, and this group accounts...
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Ulysses: Good or Bad?
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first appearance of James Joyce’s Ulysses—it was first serialized in The Little Review between March 1918 and December 1920—and today is the 96th...
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The 50 Best One-Star Amazon Reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses
Today is the publication anniversary of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses; it is also Joyce’s birthday. Elsewhere on Literary Hub, I took a look at the very different responses other famous writers have had...
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Will Self: In Praise of Difficult Novels
I write in praise of difficulty in writing—specifically difficulty in the novel form. Why? Well, not least because of the Modernist direction my own fiction has taken since I began my Umbrella Trilogy...
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Dystopia For Sale: How a Commercialized Genre Lost its Teeth
When Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale won last year’s Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, showrunner Bruce Miller invited Margaret Atwood, whose 1985 novel inspired the show, to come on stage to help accept...
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Martin Amis on the Genius of Jane Austen (and What the Adaptations Get Wrong)
This essay originally appeared in 1998. * Jane Austen, as they might say in Los Angeles, is suddenly hotter than Quentin Tarantino. But before we try to establish what the Austen phenomenon is, let us...
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