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Everything You Think You Know About Chekhov is Wrong
Everything you know about Anton Chekhov is wrong. Chekhov the downcast tubercular writing magnificently mournful plays about the declining aristocracy on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, the king...
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A Close Reading of the Best Short Story Ever Written
I was introduced to Donald Barthelme in college, in a writing workshop with the novelist Robert Cohen. We read “City of Churches” and “The School,” and for a week or so afterwards, I walked around in...
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An English Teacher Wonders: What is Literature Anyway?
It’s very strange to take a full year off of doing something that you’ve been doing for over 15 years, knowing that you’ll return to it but are utterly detached from it in the meantime. For me, that is...
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The Nun Who Wrote Letters to the Greatest Poets of Her Generation
In April 1948, Wallace Stevens received a letter from a nun. Her name was Sister Mary Bernetta Quinn, and she was completing her PhD at the University of Wisconsin. It was their first correspondence,...
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Is It Really Possible To Map Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County?
If William Faulkner had ever been given enough money to recreate Yoknapatawpha County in the world, would he have done so? The short answer is “no,” thus ending an essay long before it even had the...
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David Chariandy: ‘Black Canadians Do Not Come From Space.’
A couple years ago, Drake appeared on Saturday Night Live’s “Black Jeopardy.” If you haven”t seen that running skit, imagine the game show, but with categories like “Oh snap,” “Bye, Felicia!” and...
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The Legendary Iranian Poet Who Gives Me Hope
I grew up in a house with very few books, but there was one that came with my family from Iran and never let me go: a slender, battered book of poetry my mother displayed on the mantle, next to...
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Wuthering Heights is a Virgin’s Story, and Other Opinions of Brontë’s Classic
Two hundred years ago today, Emily Brontë was born. She died only 30 years later, of tuberculosis. Her coffin was only 16 inches wide (though this may not mean what we think it means). She wrote one...
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1921 · 1946 · 1984 · 2018 A Genealogy of the Totalitarian Novel
“Ideas are more difficult to kill than people,” a figure in Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel, American Gods, announces ominously in one of the protagonist Shadow’s phantasmagoric dreams, “but they can be...
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The Wind in the Willows Isn’t Really a Children’s Book
The Wind in the Willows is one of the most famous English children’s books, one of the most famous books about animals, and a classic book about “messing about in boats.” Famous, it certainly is....
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Zen and the Art of Alan Spence
I first heard Alan Spence in a cafe in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow called, auspiciously enough, the Third Eye Centre. It sounds other-worldly and, in some way, was. More definitely, however, it...
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A Brief History of Women Mountaineers
Do what you love most, and must do, and not only will you meet those who share your passion and know your devotion, but the choosing will lead you to mastery. Being able to live by such a creed is both...
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Gabrielle Bellot: On the Enigma of V.S. Naipaul
In 1962, in an infamous section of The Middle Passage, Sir V.S. Naipaul’s critical tour through a variety of Caribbean islands, Naipaul pauses in his specific critique to address the supposed problems...
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The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is the Best Place on the Internet
Of all the things you can read on the internet, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is one of the only good ones. In perpetual conversation with itself, ever growing and expanding—perhaps threatening,...
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On the Slyly Subversive Writing of E.M. Forster
E.M. Forster conceived of A Room with a View in 1901, when he was 22. Months after graduation from Cambridge, marooned with his mother in a dreary Neapolitan pensione that catered to middle-class...
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Why Don’t More Boys Read Little Women?
When I began teaching Little Women in my American literature survey courses, I wondered how many of my students had read the book before. In that first class, only one said she had read it in high...
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Making the Case for the Surreal Memoir
What makes for an ideal memoir? It could be an incisive story of a life (or part of a life), told with veracity and a precise attention to detail. It might be a work of prose that finds fascinating...
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The Time I Went Fishing with Barry Hannah
Yet another mid-list novelist was scheduled to lecture that afternoon at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2003 and Barry Hannah wanted no part of it. After lunch we stood out beneath a singeing...
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The Art of the Late Bloomer
The 18th century was a golden era for finding stuff in England: Roman coins in the garden soil, plesiosaur bones in the Dorset cliffs, passions buried under the crust of social expectations. Among the...
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In Praise of Sex Writing That’s About More Than Being Sexy
In the Autumn of 2013, I undertook a creative writing workshop. One seminar, our teacher shared what he’d written alongside us. In it, a middle-aged woman lay on a sofa, gently pleasuring her skin with...
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