At the Paris Review, CJ Hauser reads Rebecca for the first time and is unsettled to recognize herself in the story. “Do you know what thrills me in so many of those gothic novels? When a woman sets fire to a house. Sometimes a house feels too haunted, too complicated, to live in anymore. Imagine the cleansing relief of burning the whole thing down. I’ve been there. I get it,” she writes. By the end of the essay, the Family of Origin author realizes that to avoid the second Mrs. de Winter’s fate, she has to allow the past and present to coexist. “Probably only a very troubled person would learn things of a personal or moral nature from du Maurier. But I did. Du Maurier showed me that promising a new partner that they will eclipse your past is an act of violence against the meaningful loves that existed before. It’s a fucking bloodbath, and we are the murderers, and we forgive ourselves for it, every time.”
CJ Hauser on Gothic Literature’s Life Lessons
How to Fight Hate
“Do something. In the face of hatred, apathy will be interpreted as acceptance by the perpetrators, the public and — worse — the victims. Community members must take action; if we don’t, hate persists.” The always amazing Southern Poverty Law Center has put together “Ten Ways to Fight Hate: A Community Response Guide.”
Breaking Out
As part of a collaboration with several international magazines, Full-Stop is publishing Babelsprech International, a series of articles on poetry around the world. In the latest edition, Karel Piorecký writes about contemporary Czech poetry, drawing a line between the pre- and post-Communist periods. Related: John Yargo on the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal.
The Secret Space of Diaries
For the New Yorker, Morgan Jerkins reviews Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours and considers what keeping a diary means for “a black woman in a white world.”
So Much Depends Upon Firing You
We have finally reached peak Trump. In Hart Seely’s new book Bard of the Deal, three decades of Donald Trump speeches and interviews have been reworked into what the publisher is calling a “treasury of spoken poetry.” One can only hope there’s a poem titled, “Bored With Winning.”
Chummers
I’ve written before about the First Sentence series at Granta. The magazine asks a prominent writer to explain how they came to write an opening line. Recently, they asked Bear Down, Bear North author Melinda Moustakis to talk about the beginning of her story “River So Close”: “She’s a good-for-nothing chummer.” You could also read Jonathan Russell Clark on the art of the opening sentence.