Beauty is in the eye of the writer. Adelle Waldman discusses why many novelists fail to address female beauty in a meaningful and nuanced way. “Women are not only subject to a constant and exhausting and sometimes humiliating scrutiny—they are also belittled for caring about their beauty, mocked for seeking to enhance or to hold onto their good looks, while men are just, well, being men.”
Beauty and the Beast
The Art of the Essay
What makes an essay literary? Over at the Kenyon Review, the editors explore language as an end in itself. Also check out H.S. Cross’s Millions essay on writing what you don’t know.
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The Reindeer Uprising
“There was an inefficient system in place, and what I did was subvert it by an external rotation of reluctant holly jollies. Nasally, I came to understand that light is a thing that is produced through the collision of particulates, and boy isn’t that the truth.” As part of their year-end review, McSweeney’s republished their ten most popular pieces of 2014, including the above. Its title? “Donald Barthelme Narrates the Progress of the Reindeer.”
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Playing the Victim
The Empathy Exams, a new collection of essays by Leslie Jamison, gets its title from a piece about medical acting that was published in The Believer. On the Harper’s blog, you can read an interview with Jamison, who calls her collection “a refusal to choose between these approaches — criticism, confession, journalism.” (Michelle Huneven interviewed Jamison for The Millions a couple of years ago.)
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Lipsyte Interviewed
Fiction Daily has added a give and take with The Ask author Sam Lipsyte to its growing collection of author interviews.
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Postcard Nostalgia
Unlocking the Doors
How does Karl Ove Knausgaard delve into some of the oldest parts of his memory for his writing? "I remember every single room that I have been in from the age of seven. What I did was to place myself in those rooms, and when I started to write about them it was like unlocking a thousand small doors, all leading further into childhood," he told Cressida Leyshon at The New Yorker. Knausgaard also has a story, "Come Together" (behind the paywall), in the current issue. Pair with: Our essay on My Struggle.
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