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Silent Spring is More than a Scientific Landmark: It’s Literature
“There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” This is the surprising first sentence of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the 1962 book...
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The Meanest Things Vladimir Nabokov Said About Other Writers
Vladimir Nabokov was an unusually opinionated man—particularly when it came to literature. His own, primarily—when asked about the function of his editor, he sniffed, “By ‘editor’ I suppose you mean...
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Jane Austen and the Timeless Tradition of Mansplaining
In 1816, the year before her death, Jane Austen wrote an “Advertisement by the Authoress” to preface a novel, still unpublished, that she had completed many years before. The advertisement opens, “This...
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When Fiction Pulls Back the Curtain on American Conservatism
Whether you like it or not (and if you’re reading this, the answer is probably “not”), America is a deeply conservative country. I’m not referring to policy polls, party registration, or even the fact...
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10 Things You Should Know About Lists on the Internet
Last week on the internet, people were… upset over this GQ listicle, in which the editors asked a handful of well-regarded contemporary authors to pick a book “you don’t have to read” and suggest...
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Margaret Atwood on How She Came to Write The Handmaid’s Tale
Some books haunt the reader. Others haunt the writer. The Handmaid’s Tale has done both. The Handmaid’s Tale has not been out of print since it was first published, back in 1985. It has sold millions...
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On the Ways We Read (and Are Written To)
Jean-Paul Sartre, in What is Literature?, wrote: “There is no art except for and by others.” The philosopher’s argument was not that authors cannot enjoy writing for themselves; that every word is...
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Van Morrison, Unlikeliest of Literary Muses
For some musicians, the literary connections are obvious: Bob Dylan, for one, even before he ended up taking home the Nobel Prize for Literature. Bruce Springsteen’s talked about the influence of...
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Our Imaginations Need to Dwell Where the Wild Things Are
Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) is two months older than I am. Since it was not a book that was regularly read in Ireland in my youth, I did not come across it until I read it to my...
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On Marjane Satrapi’s Early #MeToo Novel
“To speak behind others’ backs is the ventilator of the heart,” Marjane Satrapi’s grandmother says with a smile, teacup in hand, as she prepares to gossip and argue with a group of other Iranian women...
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The Burden of a Thousand Possible Lives: On Motherhood and Conflicting Desires
Like all those who live in an ovulating body, I carry inside of me thousands of possible lives: my own and, somehow, others’. I’ve known this since I was 16, when my period pains grew so severe that...
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5 Book Reviews You Need To Read This Week
It was a stellar week for poetry reviews, with both Tracy K. Smith and Kevin Young receiving rave write-ups from the New York Times for their new much-anticipated new collections. Pulitzer Prize-winner...
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How to Suppress Women’s Writing: “She Only Wrote One Good Book.”
In about 1971 I was teaching Charlotte Brontë in a women’s studies course and decided to use her Villette instead of Jane Eyre. The number of different publishers who have in print different paperback...
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Data-Driven Amazon Bookstores Can’t Compete with Indies
The physical world is a wonderful medium, and it’s not going to go away. –Jeff Bezos, 1999 Chances are, if you are reading this, that you have for some period of your life been a regular at the kind of...
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What Snow White and the Evil Queen Taught Me About Desire
I was six when I first sat down to watch Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I was not impressed. Accustomed to the newer breed of Disney heroine—the Belles and Ariels, their animation sharper,...
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How a Christmas Present Gave Harper Lee the Time to Write To Kill a Mockingbird
Like the Christ child himself, Atticus Finch was born on Christmas. It was 1956, and Nelle Harper Lee would not be heading home to Alabama for the holidays. She couldn’t get time off from her job as an...
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Why Do Horror Stories Resonate So Deeply Right Now?
What does it say about a cultural moment when its most resonant narratives are horror stories? Among the finalists for this year’s PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, intended for “a book-length work of any...
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Reading The Golden Notebook During a Summer of Too Many Weddings
There were too many weddings that summer. White weddings, gold weddings; weddings in village churches, on beaches, at woolen mills. Collectively, they seemed to go on for too long and to involve too...
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Paul Bowles: ‘Here’s My Message. Everything Gets Worse’
The Sheltering Sky was Paul Bowles’s first novel, and although he honed his art almost to his dying day—novels, poems, stories, translations, as well as musical scores—it was this strange, uneven, and...
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George Saunders on the Emotional Realism of Bobbie Ann Mason
1. When I was a grad student back in the 1980s, Bobbie Ann Mason was considered one of the Southern reps of the so-called “dirty realists” or “Kmart realists.” Her work was praised for its frank,...
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