Essays

Writing Back to Guy and Harriet Pringle

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It wasn’t all geography, colonialism, and the erasure of the traces of the "receded Ottoman Empire,” as Manning puts it in the book, that I learned from Fortunes of War. It also taught me a lot about a certain kind of relationship, a certain kind of man.
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Essays

Why I’ve Stopped Waiting for ‘The Winds of Winter’

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This is not a transactional relationship. There is no quid pro quo here. My giving George R R. Martin money, my helping him achieve superstar status, does not earn me the right to dictate and demand when and how his next book should appear.
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Essays

Should We Still Read Norman Mailer?

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Sharp-eyed yet unreliable, inquisitive but quilted in self-regard, Mailer covered the 1960s with an insightful fatuousness that irritates and rewards as much now as it probably did then.
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Essays

My Winter with Edith Wharton

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I did more work under Edith’s influence than I had done in the six months preceding it. I admit it—I was slightly scared of her.
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Essays

The Cockroach Decade

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It took just $60 to hire somebody to kill somebody. A loft rented for $350 a month. A double feature of foreign films at the Carnegie Hill Cinema cost $1.50. The World Trade Center loomed in the distance “like twin phosphorescent robots.”
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Essays

Returning to Analog: Typewriters, Notebooks, and the Art of Letter Writing

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We’re used to working alongside multiple distractions in multiple tabs and windows: a conversation with a friend in messenger, an interesting tangent on Wikipedia, that funny cat video your mum knew you’d like.
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Essays

On Being a Trend

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This is the reason millennials are arguably the most annoying of generations, besides the economic collapse. They are caught in the middle. Too obsessed with social media to be relaxed in the “real” world; too unnatural to it to feel at ease within it.
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Essays

Write What You (Don’t) Know: Graduate School, Research, and Writing a Novel

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For someone who had an abiding interest in the world, writing from what I knew was not an option. I needed a bit of faith; I needed to take a flying leap into the unknown world just beyond my vision.
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Essays

The Literature of Mars: A Brief History

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We are entering a new age of Martian exploration in both science and science fiction. As humanity strives to reach out toward the Red Planet, more imaginations will be sparked, more pens put to work.
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Essays

Read It Again

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As my grandson sits beside me, I feel the echo of my son or daughter when we’d read together, and the even more distant echo of my father, who taught me, with a single book, the power of a human voice channeling the delights of a story.
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Essays

‘Frankenstein’ and the Science of Transitioning

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Trans people enter the narrative as problems to be solved. The constant judgement placed upon them, the way their most basic needs become a matter of public debate, encourages them to re-closet themselves, to pass for cis and hide their backgrounds out of fear.
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Essays

Us Animals: Writing the Natural World Back into the Human

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There had been yet another shift in myself and how I chose to write. It was as if the softening of my connective tissue and joints that accompanies new motherhood also found its way into my words.
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Essays

What’s in an Author Name?

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Friends and family call me Marie, and Koreans revert to Myung-Ok—but no one uses both. Marie Myung-Ok Lee then becomes the embodiment of my writing.
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Essays

The Queering of Nick Carraway

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I suspect the queer readings of Nick Carraway say more about the way we read now than they do about Nick or The Great Gatsby.
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Essays

My Search for an Incredible Piece of Sci-Trash

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The quest to find this book took me more than a decade and necessitated the help of librarians, sci-fi experts, and visits to bookstores across the U.S. 
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Essays

Obsession Is Universal

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Is there art without obsession? Obsession is endemic to the human condition.  It drives creation like sunlight nourishes plants. If artists are observers of human follies and failings, then depicting obsession comes with the terrain.
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Essays

Prison Rooms: Just £150 per Night

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At the Malmaison Oxford, prison gentrification is in.
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Essays

Kazuo Ishiguro and the Inescapable Perils of the Internet

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Ishiguro gives us a character who feels harassed and, despite his acclaim, rendered inadequate by the demands of those around him—reflective of the kind of stress that can accompany the unnatural levels of interaction technology and social media bring.
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