The Courage to Take Care of Ourselves: On Kelly Sundberg’s ‘Goodbye, Sweet Girl’

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Caleb was getting more and more violent—and we, as readers, were lulled into a false sense of security along with her.
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The Roar of Raging Nothing: The Uncanny Resemblance Between Sean Penn and Amanda McKittrick Ros

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Both books are bad, but “bad” does not suffice. A little word of three letters does not plumb the depth of these books’ failures.
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A Hole in Time: On Terrance Hayes’s ‘American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin’

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These poems puncture a hole in time, fragmenting a grief, a rage, a rebellion, an irony so deep that one can only call them blue.
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The Irreplaceable Human Voice: Louise Glück Gives Form to Devastation

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Time is such that gain necessitates loss. And Louse Glück would have us see that what we use—what we do—to appease such loss is poetry.
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Essays in Strange Forms and Peculiar Places: ‘The Shell Game’

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That’s not to say that hermit crab essays don’t teach us to think critically about that blurriness. Rather, they do just the opposite: They call attention to the ways that cultural forms and expectations create reality.
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Books Were Not Tricks, and I Was Not Feeble: On Tara Westover’s ‘Educated’

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Acknowledging that the truth is not absolute—rather unknowable—she reconciles herself to the groundlessness she had known since leaving the security of her family's righteousness: “In knowing the ground was not ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it.”
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Memoir as Addiction: On Michelle Tea’s ‘Against Memoir’

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This book, like all of Tea's best writing, bristles with life and a fierce intellect. Her voice is as distinct as ever, and her ability to conjure something—an album cover, the feeling of a hangover—in just a few phrases, like Zorro (zip, zip, zip!) is still wonderfully intact.
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It’s All So Much: On Lauren Groff’s ‘Florida’

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Florida is not a “land of contrasts,” and Groff avoids this flimsy and inaccurate conceit. Instead, she incarnates Florida’s grotesque continuity, warping the line between past and present, spirit and flesh, flourishing and decay.
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The Life of the Mind: On Helen DeWitt’s ‘Some Trick’

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In DeWitt’s world, there are Mozarts, Salieris, and the many suits whose livelihoods depend on them. No one is spared, the suits least of all.
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There Must Be Sacred Art: On Peter O’Leary’s ‘Thick and Dazzling Darkness’

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O’Leary’s project is ambitious: “The work of these poets suggests that a secular art, even in a secular age, is insufficient for representing reality completely. There must be sacred art. For poets, this means there must be religious poetry written.”
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When There’s Nothing Left to Burn, Set Yourself on Fire: On Rachel Cusk’s ‘Kudos’

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What's taken for granted in any first-person novel or memoir is now suddenly missing, and what we get in return is a revelation: a character defined as the reflective surface all others cast themselves onto.
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The Strange and the Divine: On Rita Bullwinkel’s ‘Belly Up’

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All of Bullwinkel’s stories unlock something. The strongest pieces fling the whole thing open. Burn the house down. Others are a mere suggestion of what lies outside, a hint that things are not as they appear. That is like life.
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The Harsh Beauty of Rachel Kushner’s ‘The Mars Room’

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In the shadow of The Mars Room, middlebrow literary fiction, with its urbane cosmopolitanism, its careers and affairs and families and houses, seems pale, stuffy drawing-room drama drained of vitality or force.
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On Sheila Heti and (Not) Motherhood

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Heti’s project seems to be to push the limits of the Female, to upend the necessity of Mother, to suggest whole worlds that might exist beyond the making of other smaller versions of ourselves. But what her book also does is remind us of the limits, both of our bodies and our thoughts.
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Evenings with Clarice Lispector’s Newest Translator

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After reading Lispector, we know much more of how “horrible, pure, irrevocable” it is to live.
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Narrative Is Back: On Rebekah Frumkin’s ‘The Comedown’

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Narrative is back, and it’s wearing new threads.
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Bottoming Out: On Leslie Jamison’s ‘The Recovering’

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That is the deeper secret to recovery, that force of constructive listening, the almost osmotic process of drawing the pain out of a human being in crisis and allowing it to settle, if only for an hour, in the body of the group.
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Image and Appropriation: On Lynne Tillman’s ‘Men and Apparitions’

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Tillman is not asking how should a person be or how does the world look, but rather, how does a person become? And how do images complicate these notions of ourselves and this desire to become someone else?
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