Clik here to view.
Djuna Barnes: “The Most Famous Unknown of the Century!”
When I was an undergraduate at Cornell University I received a grant to travel to the University of Maryland, where the Djuna Barnes archive is housed at the Hornbake Library. I was a senior then, 20...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Close Reading of the ‘Censored’ Passages of The Picture of Dorian Gray
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” wrote Oscar Wilde in the preface to the 1891 edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray. “Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Richard Flanagan on Social Media and the Death of a Private Life
This piece originally appeared in Financial Times. I know little about ghostwriting, other than having once, nearly 30 years ago now, ghostwritten a ghost, my subject having shot himself three weeks...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Pin-Ups First, Athletes Second: Sexism in Surfing
We crowded around the TV in a sweaty demountable and watched footage of the high school surfing team. I saw stringy boys in black wetsuits ride wave after wave; I was waiting for footage of me, which...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why We Love—and Need to Leave Behind—Dead Girl Stories
Like every young American woman, I grew up among dead girls. The most prominent dead girl of my youth was JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty queen who was bludgeoned and strangled in her home in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Enduring Enigma of Véra Nabokov
“The more you leave me out,” Véra Nabokov told Brian Boyd while he was researching his two-volume biography of her husband, Vladimir Nabokov, “the closer to the truth you’ll be.” Not that biographers...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why James Baldwin Went to the South and What It Meant to Him
i. the illusion of a mirror / the mirror of an illusion In the fall of 1957, James Baldwin made his first trip to the Deep South. In complex ways and for even more complex reasons, he was returning to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Holden Caulfield: Egotistical Whiner or Melancholy Boy Genius?
Here are some things we’ve been talking about in the Literary Hub office lately: Is Holden Caulfield a tragic hero or an unbearable whiny teen? Is he misunderstood? Is he relevant to youth today? Is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Experimental German Writer For Whom “Dumb” is A Badge of Honor
Reading through the complete works of Rainald Goetz recently after finishing a translation of his book Insane, a cult classic in Germany and the first of his novels to be published in English, my mind...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lyn Hejinian: Everything is Imminent in Anything
Baudelaire called the public, in its wild enthusiasm for photography, “sun-worshippers.” They loved what they saw. “From that moment onward, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Not Everyone Loves Proust
Lots of people love Marcel Proust. Most writers, probably. These six writers, definitely. He is frequently heralded as one of the greatest writers of all time—but not everyone is on board. Even Proust...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why I Added, Then Deleted, Trump from My Novel
I wrote the first draft of what became my novel Early Work from the summer of 2015 through the early fall of 2016. I was revising it when Trump was elected. There were already a few references to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How Can Fiction Predict a Future That’s Already Happening?
The problem with setting fiction in the near future is that it keeps coming closer—and usually about twice as fast as one expects. By mid-century, will we still stare at our phones? Or will we instead...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Forget Zorro: Joaquín Murieta is the Outlaw-Hero We Need
My father loved Zorro. He also identified strongly with another Hispanic outlaw-hero, Speedy Gonzales, the Warner Bros. cartoon mouse with ADHD who ran rings around authority. Reading The Life and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Watching The Handmaid’s Tale While Transitioning
Earlier this year I began using services available through my HMO to transform my body from male to female. I’d already taken on a female name, pronouns, and presentation, and now I was changing my...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The 100 Best One-Star Reviews of The Catcher in the Rye
On this day, 67 years ago, Little, Brown and Co. published a slim novel by a 31-year-old writer named J.D. Salinger. Since then, the book has been divisive, to say the least, but it remains an American...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My Book of Men: On the Poetry of Survival
After the last poetry reading I did, a stranger from the audience approached me to tell me he had a humiliation fantasy about me. Is this a story? What if I start it like this: Nearly everyone had left...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Series, Sagas, Cycles… How About We Call Them “River Novels”?
The attention-spans of readers, we are told, have shrunk, if not disappeared altogether. The chronically distracted just can’t be expected to sit through a novel, much less a novel that begets still...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On the Art and Influence of Hemingway’s Short Stories
Seven years after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, Ernest Hemingway, like Edwin Arlington Robinson’s privileged gentleman Richard Cory, “one calm summer night, / Went home and put a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fake News, Hyper-Patriotism, and War: America in 1918
A woman of 24, a writer for a shoestring news venue, arrives at her workspace one morning to find two men sitting on her desk. She focuses on the taller of the two and realizes he “might be anything at...
View Article