Writing didn’t serve the purpose I wanted it to, which was to fix the fundamentally broken relationship between myself and other people. Read more
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Category: Essays
A Brief History of Summer Reading
We rarely talk about spring books or winter reading. What is it about summer that inspired a whole genre of its own? Read more
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Ishmael Reed Gets the Last Laugh
His brilliantly idiosyncratic fiction has travestied everyone from Moses to Lin-Manuel Miranda, and laid a foundation for the freewheeling genre experiments of writers such as Paul Beatty, Victor LaValle, and Colson Whitehead. Yet there’s always been more to Reed than subversion and caricature. Laughter, in his books, unearths legacies suppressed by prejudice, élitism, and mass-media coöptation. Read more
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In True Crime, We Find a Deep, Elusive Connection
Women love true crime. While certainly not a universal truth, it’s a generalization that feels apt enough that even SNL has noticed. On February 27, the song spoof “Murder Show,” aired to general acclaim — if the women I follow on Twitter are any indication. As the skit begins, Nick Jonas leaves his girlfriend alone for an evening of unwinding and self care. Bubble baths and sheet masks come to mind. But as soon as he shuts the door behind him, she curls up on the couch, opens Netflix, and breaks into song about the specific delight of watching murder shows. Read more
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The War on History Is a War on Democracy
A scholar of totalitarianism argues that new laws restricting the discussion of race in American schools have dire precedents in Europe. Read more
On the Avant-Garde Literary Genius of Donald Barthelme
He never pretended to greatness, and he made fun of those who did. His fallback, his signature, is always humor. For all his avant-gardism, and occasional difficulty, he is a very funny writer, even a jokey one at times. He’s more entertaining to read, and requires less heavylifting, than many of the postmoderns, and he enjoyed more popular success than just about any of them. Read more
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A Brief History of the Book Blurb
The hyperbole on book jackets—both the plot summaries and the lists of adulatory adjectives that go with them—have long frustrated authors, but no one would dispute that a good blurb has crucial functions: it’s a chance to hook readers, and can help them situate a new book within a genre or tradition. Read more
Jews in Space: On the Unsung History of Jewish Writers and the Birth of Science Fiction
Lavie Tidhar Considers the Past, Present, and Future of Jewish Writers in Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Read more
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For Literary Novelists the Past Is Pressing
For the past two decades, the novels celebrated for defining our time have almost always been books set within our time, from Jonathan Franzen’s voluminous social comedies to Sally Rooney’s smartly self-knowing novels and the seam of contemporary autofiction that has run between them. Historical fiction, by contrast, has not been in fashion. Or, rather, it has been seen as its own fusty fashion, relentlessly uncontemporary and easy to caricature, filled with mothballed characters who wear costumes rather than clothes, use words like “Prithee!” while having modern-day thoughts, and occasionally encounter villains immediately recognizable by their yellow teeth or suspicious smell. Read more
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What We Lose When Literary Criticism Ends
With mainstream media uninterested in books coverage that doesn’t get clicks, writers and readers are being left out in the cold. Read more
