Susan Sontag

Women Mentoring Women in Sigrid Nunez’s Sempre Susan

Women Mentoring Women in Sigrid Nunez’s Sempre Susan

Sigrid Nunez’s memoir of the author’s relationship with Susan Sontag, the writer and doyenne of the twentieth-century New York intelligentsia, plays with the concept of the memoir genre. Nunez largely disappears from her own pages as she explains, through vignettes and remembered lines, Sontag’s mentorship.

Out with T.S. Eliot, and In with Cathy Park Hong: Poetry Criticism in the 21st Century

Out with T.S. Eliot, and In with Cathy Park Hong: Poetry Criticism in the 21st Century

The debate about whether Rupi Kaur’s poetry (and by extension, the whole genre dubbed “instapoetry”) is good or bad has apparently been revived. Whether that debate is actually useful in the terms it has set out for itself remains to be seen. Most often, it seems, when the poet in question is a young woman…

Postcards from Unexpected Places

Postcards from Unexpected Places

Like long handwritten letters and atlases, postcards descend from another world now deemed impractical. They belong to the world of Denis Breen in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Loyal Blood and his travels across the American West in Annie Proulx’s Postcards. Ruth, in Lorrie Moore’s story “Real Estate,” finds the form “so careless and cheap.” The…

“Subjects We Never Completely Learn”: An Interview with Daniel Nester
|

“Subjects We Never Completely Learn”: An Interview with Daniel Nester

Daniel Nester’s prose zings back and forth between the heart and the funny bone. His latest book, Shader, is a kaleidoscopic coming-of-age story told in brief chapters called “notes.” It’s like one of those family slideshows that make us laugh, groan, squirm in our chairs, and sometimes cry. His previous books include How to Be…