Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year
What is it about being in your early twenties that makes the world seem so overwhelmingly crowded and yet so desperately lonely all at once? There’s something bewitching about it, too, and melancholy.
Blog
The Self-Made Heir
Most Americans identify as “middle class,” though this is a reflection of mentality more than income. Economists define “middle income” households as those with incomes between 66% and 200% of the median household income. This means an annual income range of roughly $24,000 and $73,000 for one person. As someone who’s previously made both of…
The Narrative Medium of our Times: An Interview with TV Critic Matthew Gilbert
TV is no longer the second cousin to film; in many ways, it’s become the higher art form. And to a great extent, television has become society’s barometer—it shapes and tells us more about who we are than almost any other medium.
Review: LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE by Celeste Ng
The novel opens with Elena Richardson watching her home burn down, and readers backtrack the circumstances leading to an act of arson.
“We are paid the worth of our work, perhaps”
I recently devoured Samantha Hunt’s “A Love Story,” which was in the New Yorker back in May. I loved every moment of that astonishing story, but there was one that made me laugh/sob in that way that lets you know you’re reading something you won’t be forgetting soon.
All In: Great Books by Authors Who Immersed Themselves in the Story
Anyone who is a writer is also a researcher. Stories sprung from one’s imagination are not exempt from these duties. Fiction writers frequently write about a time and place they know—think Conrad and the Congo in The Heart of Darkness or Harper Lee and the rural South. Similarly, writers become interested in a time or…
Show Don’t Scream
The best horror, in writing or movies, occurs when we understand it the least. Not in the sense of “jump scares,” but rather in the sense of how it is being built and portrayed.
Before the Storm and After, Houston Still a Poet’s City
Houston is a poet’s city. I’d say more so than a fiction city, or a playwright’s city, or even a petroleum city for that matter (though, of course, it’s all of those things too).
To Remember is Also to Lose: Marguerite Duras’ The Lover
On the very first page of her most famous and autobiographical novel, The Lover, Marguerite Duras seems to capture in one line the most powerful aspect of the book: “Very early in my life, it was too late.”