Reviews

Becca Rothfeld’s Exuberant Ode to the Risks of Rapture

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There is no experience of longing that is not, at the same time, an ethical revelation. 
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Reviews

Sharp Bookmark: On Salman Rushdie’s ‘Knife’

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Reviews

Elias Canetti’s Words Against Death

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The marks on the page are the opposite of the marks on the tombstone.
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Essays

Paul Auster’s Voice

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Paul Auster died on April 30 after being the voice in my ear for a month.
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Essays

Against ‘Latin American Literature’

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The classification of “Latin American literature” puts both Anglophone and Hispanophone writers in a double-bind.
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Essays

Hymn for Walpurgisnacht

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Walpurgisnacht is a gloaming time when the membrane between the here and the hereafter is more porous.
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Reviews

In Alexandra Tanner’s ‘Worry,’ Illness Is the Status Quo

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In a novel where sisterhood entails constant conflict, illness provides an unexpected emotional salve.
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Essays

The Other Boy and the Heron

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The heron has a robust mythological history across many cultures, and while the meanings differ, many deal with death, rebirth, and transformation.
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Essays

The Virtue of Slow Writers

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The slow writer embraces the protracted and unpredictable timeline, seeing it not as fraught or frustrating but an opportunity for openness and discovery.
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Essays

Deafness Is Not a Silence:
On the Suppression of Sign Language

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Reviews

At Long Last, a Translation Worthy of ‘Pedro Páramo’

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The latest translation of 'Pedro Páramo' is a mystifying work, in the dual sense that it is confounding and that its language possesses an almost mystical quality.
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Essays

Tennis Lessons from David Foster Wallace

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I was, and still am, the most reviled type of tennis player.
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Essays

The Path Is No Path: On Not Becoming a Poet

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What makes a poet a poet? There is of course no simple answer. You could argue that self-declaration is enough. You could also argue there must be a measure.
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Reviews

The Collaborative Alchemy of W.G. Sebald’s Photographs

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By rephotographing the material Sebald brought to him, Michael Brandon-Jones played a critical role in helping the writer achieve a tonal consistency between text and image.
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Reviews

Kelly Link’s Romantic Imagination

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Though Link’s stories often keep closer bedfellows with Karen Russell and Aimee Bender, her novel is pulpier and more bathetic, in some ways a piece of straight fantasy.
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Essays

Pressure-and-Release: Writing Shanghai’s Rooftoppers

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I remember crying the day I made a decision about his character: It seemed clear what needed to happen.
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Reviews

The Everyday Horror of ‘Other Minds and Other Stories’

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In someone else’s hands, these stories might be little more than typeset urban legends, the stuff of 2000s-era AOL email chains, but Sims renders them as something both terrifying and mesmerizing.
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Essays

Falling Out of Love with Lyric Poetry

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Bang out hundreds of pages of rhyming couplets about something other than your identity or your perceptions, and you, too, will likely fall out of love with lyric poetry.
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