Nothing but Time: On the Effects of Reading Meg Wolitzer
“Aren’t you tired?” my husband asked one night when, rather than going straight to sleep, I turned on my bedside lamp and cracked open Meg Wolitzer’s The Ten-Year Nap.
Reading
Women Who Open Doors: Bluebeard and Horror
Women in stories often get punished. In fairy tales, it’s often for greed or pettiness or vanity or a slew of other reasons. But the heroines of fairy tales also get punished.
Can the Short Story Unify Us?—Finding Community in The Best American Short Stories 2016
We have made it to 2017 with little protest (to the passing of last year, that is) and a whole lot of wonder about what to think of the previous twelve months. With an array of emotion fluttering over the land like strong winds, the confusion and misunderstanding and, for many, fear and distaste, give…
‘A Couple of Waterloos in Every State’
The US owns the road novel—for good reason. There’s Lolita, The Grapes of Wrath, and On the Road—to name just a few.
Exploring personal politics in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The sinister Jean Brodie continues to bewitch: decades after the publication of the novel that bears her name, the myth of her humanism persists; she has long been shorthand for a strain of idealism and independent thought that she never represented in the first place. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, about a controversial teacher…
Download One of These Literary Podcasts Today
We live in the Golden Age of podcasts. They’ve been around for a while, but the medium has exploded in the past few years. Whatever your interest, there is a podcast for you, probably several. It should come as no surprise that for the literary-inclined, podcasts represent an embarrassment of riches. In an overstuffed media…
On Fictional Sex in the ’90s
Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away–that is, in 1990s mid-Atlantic America, in which I was miserable in a very teenage way, being a teenager–I began to read Tom Robbins.
The Physics of Poetry or the Poetry of Physics
When I started my Google search with the words “physics and poetry” I did so with some reluctance, knowing that each time I clicked on a headline or hit the return key I was willfully handing over hours of time to the trailings of one of my recent curiosities.
Reading Erika Meitner and Katherine Anne Porter
Growing up in North Carolina, I was surrounded by languages half-understood. At synagogue, there was the Hebrew I read and chanted but couldn’t understand.