Duality is a constant theme of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final novel, and fracture along the resulting fault lines is its constant threat. Fitzgerald mirrored these fractures in a brilliant nonlinear structure, though whether he fully appreciated his own craft is unclear, given that he eventually decided to sabotage it.
All of us dread recognizing the one true powerlessness we have in the world: that ultimate impotence in the face of death. But more than anyone else, a mother is expected to feel powerful in this fight against mortality. Her primary job is to fight death, calmly, every day.
In fiction, it is never a good idea to attend a dinner party. We read dinner party stories to get messy, to get everybody drunk, and to hear what they’ve been keeping quiet about for years. These fictional parties almost always end in a revelation, and usually not a happy one.
In this new edition, Machado has taken on the duty of an antique frame restorer. The resulting work is a hybrid form, a beautiful and terrible monster that shifts whenever you look at it, back and forth between history and fantasy, repression and liberation, horror and desire.
Great child narrators feel like a Oulipo trick, pulled off seamlessly. Instead of writing without certain letters, writers of child narrators blind themselves to certain truths.
Mutable logic flows through every aspect of Oyeyemi’s new novel—plot, character, and space—revealing the flexibility of structures and worldviews that we normally see as rigid and immovable.
In amplifying the tension that lies between a woman’s internal language and her external one, novels by Claire-Louise Bennet and Sayaka Murata examine the woman living on the periphery of her society.
The house is often used as a symbol of security in literature, and a ruined home can speak to what a given writer thinks we need protection from. Both the threats to security, and the emotional impact of a literary ruin shift with the writer and her cultural moment.
Jansson’s 1989 novel serves as a particularly poignant antithesis of the “loner artist” narrative, dealing instead with a loving partnership that, rather than getting in the way of artistic work, lifts and expands it.
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