Essays

My Life in Stories

- | 22
I would have to try to get better – to improve as a writer – in the public eye. Writing stories. For better or for worse, I surrendered myself to the system’s clankings.
- | 22
● ● ●
Essays

‘There It Is’: Vietnam and the Generosities of Fiction

- | 9
If there were no such thing as fiction, we’d have had to invent it, if we ever wanted to make sense out of a thing like the Vietnam War.
- | 9
● ● ●
Essays

On Superheroes and Superintendents

- | 2
It seems obvious to say, but wouldn’t we all like that chance to start from issue one, with a whole slew of villains and love interests and story arcs to cover?
- | 2
● ● ●
Essays Notable Articles

Shutting the Drawer: What Happens When a Book Doesn’t Sell?

- | 73
The truth is, my novel isn't selling, and it probably won't. There, I've said it. Eventually, a writer must accept rejection, accept the death of her first true darling, and move on. Can I face that sobering reality? Can I put my first book into the drawer, and shut it?
- | 73
● ● ●
Essays

No Place Like Home

- | 5
At the risk of stating the obvious: isn’t it strange, I mean, this thing about being a human being breathing and thinking and sensing and dwelling always, always, in a place?
- | 5
● ● ●
Essays Notable Articles

Making Room for Readers

- | 39
It’s a mistake to rarify reading and put books out of reach. It’s a mistake to assume that readers are “mostly born and only a little made.” Because those discoveries in libraries and bookstores -- and, yes, on my parents’ shelves, too -- are what made me a reader, not some mysterious, bibliogenic accident of birth.
- | 39
● ● ●
Essays

Anniversaries, Anesthesia, and Elizabeth Bishop

- | 10
The fixating on being “now exactly at the age” or moment when the anniversary of a terrible thing that happened or didn’t happen that Elizabeth Bishop describes, I know this. The same week I received my copies of the new Bishop volumes edited by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, I took my three-year-old son to the emergency room.
- | 10
● ● ●
Essays Prizes

Why Do We Care About Literary Awards?

- | 16
Getting worked up about the fact that really interesting, innovative fiction so often gets ignored by awards judges is, when you think about it, a little bit absurd.
- | 16
● ● ●
Essays

Why Rent? On Our Lost Pursuit of Property

- | 5
We can try to keep realizing westward, but unfortunately, some things are simply finite. Would that the ownership of property — of land, of moving water — were as simple as what “Why Rent?” ads or political rhetoric about home ownership imply.
- | 5
● ● ●
Essays

Following the Moon: Plot and the Novels of Tana French

- | 8
Beyond the world of storytelling, plot is defined as a secret scheme to reach a specific end. Or it's a parcel of land. Or it means to mark a graph, chart, or map: the plotting shows us what has changed; our ship is headed this way. To a writer (me) interested in (obsessed with?) plot-making, all of these are significant definitions.
- | 8
● ● ●
Essays

Scared Straight: Writers and The New Happiness

- | 37
Whereas previous generations of accomplished writers were awash in alcoholism and cigarettes, sexual-romantic openness, spiritual misery, and financial ruin, today’s young writers are more likely to faithfully drink 8-10 glasses of water daily, be married, get 7 to 8 hours of sleep each night, and have a decent credit score.
- | 37
● ● ●
Essays Reviews

The Second Life of Irmgard Keun

- | 8
The German novelist Irmgard Keun's life was the stuff of fiction: she was a best-selling debut novelist at twenty-six, published a second bestseller a year later, was blacklisted by the Nazi regime and in exile by the spring of 1936. She was possessed of a spectacular talent. She managed to convey the political horrors she lived through with the lightest possible touch, even flashes of humor.
- | 8
● ● ●
Essays Reviews

What Ever Happened to the New Atheism?

- | 26
Five years ago, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens launched a jihad against religion. But their colleague A.C. Grayling’s new “Humanist Bible” suggests something surprising: maybe the quarrel wasn’t really with God after all.
- | 26
● ● ●
Essays

Good Luck, Memory

- | 13
As I become more comfortable with the forgetting, I realize the shape of the remembering.
- | 13
● ● ●
Essays

Quintessentially English: Middlemarch Between Bristol and Bath

- | 6
Railway tracks get recycled into public pathways, now; in Middlemarch, they aren’t built yet, and exist only in the form of industrial agents who come to plan their route through the fields, to the dismay of the farmers who don’t understand what they want.
- | 6
● ● ●
Essays

What Harry Potter Knows

- | 25
This is one of those weeks in which everyone talks about Harry Potter, and in which it’s tempting to be that writer, you know that writer, who does the jaded contrarian take on it all.
- | 25
● ● ●
Essays

Megan Abbott, Literary Criminal

- | 6
Abbott isn't merely a poster girl for this increasingly progressive atmosphere surrounding "genre." Her novels are distinguished by rhythmic prose, historical settings , and a candor about the way people live.
- | 6
● ● ●
Essays

The Year of Wonders

- | 45
It was midday on a Monday in early August of the year 2000 and the bidding on my first novel had reached six figures, then paused for people to track down more cash. I was 32. I’d never made over $12,000 in a year.
- | 45
● ● ●