Essays

On Setting and Craft

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It’s not that I find character and plot and structure unimportant. It’s that, for me, they’re deeply intertwined with place.
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Essays

Can Literature Make Us Better People?

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If we take seriously the claims of goodness that works of literature make—claims that needn’t divert from ugliness, and indeed often illuminate systems of injustice—then our time spent in fictional spaces is hardly wasted.
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Essays

Who Is Greek?

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Writers wrestle in their stories with the myth of Greekness, working out an answer on the queer bodies of characters who identify as Greek differently from how they are supposed to.
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Essays

Books Out of Place

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I take it upon myself to pluck used books off a stranger’s stoop or from a trash can lid. This is how they sneak into my life, crawling with traces of the people who held them in the past, who touched them, who were touched by them. Strangers, like germs, cling to the pages of the books I steal for myself.
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Essays

More Than Just Statistics: On the Victims of Criminal Injustice

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These three books give us flesh and blood, beating hearts you’ll still be able to hear long after the books are closed. I can’t say it will be easy reading, but I can promise it will be worthwhile.
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Essays

A Matter of Survival: On the Value of Fashion in Literature

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Are issues of gender and race the reasons that fashion is often viewed as an inherently immature topic in the literary sphere?
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Essays

The Steady, Irresistible Call of Instagram’s Rare-Book Dealers

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These young turks are bringing one of the most inaccessible corners of the book world into the digital public square—and tempting me with $100 siren calls every time I open the damn app.
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Essays

Notes on the Art of Rhetoric

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Rhetoric is persuasion, and persuasion is seduction. And seduction, in human language, is syntactical.
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Essays

Objects of Fear and Worship: The Evolution of Aliens in Literature

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The sorns are slender and humanoid and are the scientists and thinkers; the hrossa resemble overstretched otters; they are poets and musicians; and the pfifltriggi are the builders, looking like insectile frogs.
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Essays

In Defense of Third Person

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I believe third-person narration is the greatest artistic tool humans have devised to tell the story of what it means to be human.
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Essays

The Uncomfortable Whiteness of Contemporary War Literature

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One can hope that we might draw lessons from the Vietnam War’s legacy of near-erasure of non-white experiences; that the growth of veterans writing workshops and anthologies will represent to future generations a more complete picture of The Forever War.
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Essays

What’s a Library to Do? On Homelessness and Public Spaces

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A library is supposed to be a place for all people. But how does the library keep its doors open to all?
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Essays

Plunging Into the Infinite: How Literature Captures the Essence of Chess

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Fiction has the unparalleled ability to grant us insight into a character's psyche. It is therefore uniquely qualified to explore the nature of chess itself.
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Essays

Write What You Know? Identity Politics and Fiction

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It requires a peculiar moment in contemporary culture when certain white male writers can decry that their jobs are harder as white men than if they were minorities. In that way, storytelling as with most things bears a truly striking institutional likeness—to the extent that the enterprise of writing and publishing is an institution—to our current politics.
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Essays

In Defense of Autodidacticism

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Autodidacticism, I felt, was something miraculous, a mark of irrepressible curiosity, a way of slicing through disciplinary borders.
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Essays

Adapting the Bard: On the Hogarth Shakespeare Project’s Diversity Problem

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It is disappointing when a project aims to see “the Bard’s plays retold by acclaimed, bestselling novelists and brought to life for a contemporary readership,” yet the writers selected are not ultimately representative of all that contemporary society has to offer.
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Essays

Women Who Want Out

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Shafrir, Lacey, and Nutting have written novels about women who just want out: of their love lives, their work lives, and the networks that startup culture has engineered to broker mergers between the two. Please, they are saying. Stop it. Leave us alone.
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Essays

The Creative Life: How We Do It (Any Way We Can)

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We’re everywhere.  Poets and children’s book writers.  Novelists and memoirists.  Painters and sculptors, dancers and actors. We clean your teeth, snake the clogs in your drain, and drop off color copies to your desk during the week. 
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