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Appalachia Isn’t the Reason We’re Living in Trump Country
In 2016, two very transformative things happened that re-shaped my life: the country elected Donald Trump as president, and I moved from East Tennessee to Southeast Texas. These changes, in my mind,...
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The Literature of Ezili, Vodou Spirit Force of Queer Black Womanhood
Water is eternal summer, and the depths of winter, too. When I arrived on the west bank of the Mississippi River in August 2005, everything, everything in my life was midsummer, bright, and new. I had...
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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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Appalachia Isn’t the Reason We’re Living in Trump Country
In 2016, two very transformative things happened that re-shaped my life: the country elected Donald Trump as president, and I moved from East Tennessee to Southeast Texas. These changes, in my mind,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Literature of Ezili, Vodou Spirit Force of Queer Black Womanhood
Water is eternal summer, and the depths of winter, too. When I arrived on the west bank of the Mississippi River in August 2005, everything, everything in my life was midsummer, bright, and new. I had...
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Every Publication is a Kind of Death
The first words of David Bowie’s “Lazarus” are, “Look up here, I’m in heaven.” The last words to make me cry in a theater were, “In loving memory of our princess, Carrie Fisher.” Denis Johnson closes a...
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On the Very Contemporary Art of Flash Fiction
Lord Chesterfield called the novel “a kind of abbreviation of a Romance.” Ian McEwan described the more compact novella as “the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated, ill-shaven giant.” William...
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How Medieval Storytellers Shape Our Understanding of Romance
The very word romance comes from the word roman—that is, a narrative written in one of the Romance languages derived from Latin (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian). These tales often...
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How Do You Write One of Humanity’s Most Intimate Moments?
Brian Turner: Over the course of several email exchanges, I asked a handful of the writers included in this anthology to think about their own internal struggles and processes when they meditate and...
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The Fine Art of Falling to Pieces
Once upon a time I was falling in love, But now I’m only falling apart. –Bonnie Tyler, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” What happens to a woman alone? This question, though in theory settled by...
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Can We Ever Escape History? On Walter Kempowski’s Life’s Work
Translated by Susan Bernofsky. January 1945. The Red Army is advancing toward East Prussia. By the end of this icy winter, nearly 750,000 refugees will attempt to escape from the front, fleeing west...
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Why the Hardliners of the World Fear the Word
One of the questions a writer is bound to ask him or herself is whether art can change the world? Can it unite people across languages, politics and religious beliefs? Change the way people view the...
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Hannah Arendt on the Time She Met W.H. Auden
I met Auden late in his life and mine—at an age when the easy, knowledgeable intimacy of friendships formed in one’s youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left, or expected to be...
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Onfim Wuz Here: On the Unlikely Art of a Medieval Russian Boy
It was not until the fortuitous discovery, well into the Soviet era, of troves of manuscripts in Novgorod that the modern world learned of medieval Slavonic literacy. They are composed on beresty, thin...
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The Tragedies of Aeschylus Are Truly Timeless
There is a striking moment, unparalleled in its grotesquery and courage, in Aristophanes’s comedy, The Frogs: two groups of dead people engage in a debate regarding the art of the two great tragedians,...
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