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Closeup photograph of the daily cells on a calendar

A Day in the Life

I’ve worked full time and attended the MFA program at NYU full time for about eighteen months now. While I’ll certainly miss the program and all the people associated with it once I graduate in May, it’ll be something of a relief to return to my usual Monday to Friday, nine to five existence. Some…

Cover art for The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits

Women in Trouble: The Vanishers

The Vanishers: A Novel Heidi Julavits Doubleday, March 2012 304 pages Shortly after Julia Severn, the heroine of Heidi Julavits’s fourth novel, drops out of the Institute of Integrated Parapsychology—or, “the Workshop,” an insular monoculture of clairvoyant parlor games, Fair Isle sweaters, and home-brewed tea—she is enlisted by a French film-studies academic to psychically hunt…

Old Victorian sketch of St. Paul's Cathedral in London

Compassing the Truth: Language in the Historical Novel

  Writing a novel set in 17th Century London, I wrestle regularly with understanding my characters’ world. Have I done a good enough job comprehending their relationship to time? To daylight and darkness, to religion and mortality? I worry about getting the physical details of daily life right in the story I’m trying to tell…and…