The Millions Interview

Laird Hunt Grapples with the Past: The Millions Interview

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I don’t know how we get off this road of whiteness and onto some other. I do know that it’s real and we can’t afford abstractions when we discuss it and think about it and fight it.
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Essays Lists

Better Late Than Never: On Blooming as a Reader

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My parents are immigrants -- English is not their first language -- and neither are they readers or cultural mavens. We did not have many books in the house, and I was not read to as a child...Once I started school, there were of course books assigned, and I read them obediently if not enthusiastically. Mine was a somewhat typical suburban childhood: I watched a lot of TV and ate a lot of Doritos.
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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Sonya Chung

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The central question Paisner asks is, What happens when you are carried into a nether realm of anything-goes, and your loved ones are not willing to come along with you?
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Post-40 Bloomers

Maker & Marketer: An Interview With Caitlin Hamilton Summie

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There is a vibrant, different literary world outside New York — and some incredible work being done — and I think the presumption that the best of literature is in New York or that New York is the center of literary life is in fact damaging.
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Millions Quiz

The Millions Quiz: The Best Political Fiction

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For Gordimer, a political writer was one who ruthlessly rendered social breakdown, but who also crafted characters that embodied the possibility of political upheaval and societal renewal; indeed the writer of the truly political novel must himself be driven by this possibility.
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The Millions Interview

Fiction Is a Trudge, Poetry Is a Dance: On Poet Novelists

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The murky area between genres has always been the place where I feel most at home.
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Reviews

The Big Book I Was Waiting For: Alexander Chee’s ‘Queen of the Night’

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You feel, as you read, that you are being swept away by this delicious plot and voice, and that the novel wants to be read slowly -- is actually smarter and deeper and more intricately constructed than can be appreciated at its decidedly propulsive pace.
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Essays

We Know Less Than We Think We Do: Why David Brooks Is Not a Pariah But a Harbinger of Hope

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I am surprised to find myself rooting for -- eagerly awaiting -- something that many would consider highly improbable: a retraction and an apology by 'New York Times' conservative columnist David Brooks for his July 17 opinion piece, “Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White.”
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Post-40 Bloomers

Small Victories, Large Discoveries: On Fishes, Ponds, and Finding Open Spaces

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That not all good or great art is recognized is easy to forget. We can too readily entrust tastemakers of the day -- the Academie of 1874 France, A-list publishing houses and magazines, even the Twitter kings and queens -- to point us to ideas, works, and forms that are worthwhile.
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Essays

Mourning, Meaning, and Moving On: Life After ‘Mad Men’

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We know that we became absorbed, that we experienced great pleasure in watching, and that we couldn’t wait for each new season to begin. We know, or feel at least, that we have participated in something significant, a cultural moment. But what I want to know now, or try to know, is this: Is it art?
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The Millions Interview

A Happy Sort of Pessimism: The Millions Interviews James Hannaham

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I don't think of my true black gay freakiness as subversive, any more than the true white straight Republican freakazoids out in the heartland think of themselves as subversive, even as they're plotting to replace the government with a bunch of gender normative marionettes and privatize motherhood.
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Curiosities

Sneak Peek at Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

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Post-40 Bloomers

Agnes Martin’s Perfection: Now and Not Yet

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Who was this reclusive Agnes Martin, and from where do these so-called “inspired” paintings come from? Who is the person generating these canvasses of quiet beauty? The average person finds comfort in narrative; in comprehensible cause and effect.
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Post-40 Bloomers

Ruthless, Beautiful, Dangerous, Comforting: How It Is in the World of Tove Jansson  

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Literarily, I am about 11 years old -- falling in love over and again with that secret understanding, the deep solace that odd, lonely children typically find in books about odd, lonely children. This is my best explanation for why the adult stories and novels of Tove Jansson have captivated me so fully.
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Screening Room

Please, Oh Please: On Madam Secretary and the Ladies of TV    

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I want my Secretary of State to be clear that, for as long as her job description includes tending to ISIS, then tending to ISIS is more important than the PTA.
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Essays

On the Nightstand: On Deciding What to Read Next

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Of the mess of books that has been unsystematically scattered throughout my home, and my life, which ones will make it to the nightstand? In what order will they be stacked? Perhaps most importantly: how will I decide?
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Post-40 Bloomers

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Burst of Sicilian Sun

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When I read Lampedusa the sun bursts up indeed, thawing all of that deeply seeded “puritanical horror,” and reconciling life forces that, as Lampedusa attempts to show us, were never meant to be opposed.
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Essays

Mad Men: It’s All About Family Values

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If Mad Men is itself a kind of advertisement -- a reflection and dramatization of our deepest desires, the ones we didn’t know we had -- then its message is both timeless and markedly modern: family is everything; we are hungry for family; your “real” family are, simply, the people who actually know you.
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