Epilogue: A Memoir, by Will Boast Both a remembrance and a elegiac account of the loss of a family, Boast’s 2014 memoir (a recipient of The Rome Prize) tracks the tragic early death of his mother Nancy, the untimely death of his younger brother Rory, and the family secret left […]
An Unnecessary Woman, by Rabih Alameddine “I like outsiders,” Aaliya Sohbi tells us, “phantoms wandering the cobwebbed halls of the doomed castle where life must be lived.” The narrator of Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman, is herself an outsider, a reclusive, seventy-two-year-old bibliophile who lives alone in the Beirut apartment […]
The summer of 2020 is unlike those past—no traveling, no baseball games, limited beach and park time, if any, and none of the barbecues and gatherings under the sun that so define our idea of summer. With that in mind, here are some summer-themed reads, escapes reminiscent of summers past […]
Space Opera, by Catherynne Valente Having recently watched the surprisingly good Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga on Netflix, I’ve been thinking a lot about Catherynne Valente’s novel Space Opera. The book is in the same vein as the movie – funny, weird, occasionally touching – but being […]
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays, by Alexander Chee “Writing is a way of going to the depth of Being,” wrote Marguerite Yourcenar, and the sixteen essays that make up Alexander Chee’s 2018 memoir are at their heart about writing—but they are also about striving to succeed as a […]
Author: The Portraits of Beowulf Sheehan, with a foreword by Salman Rushdie. Beowulf Sheehan, the literary world’s foremost photographer, has a newly collected volume of stunning photographs of contemporary literature’s most prominent writers—as the publisher tell us, “from Roxane Gay to Masha Gessen, Patti Smith to Zadie Smith, Karl Ove […]
If you’re devoting some of your stay-at-home to a work-in-progress, here are three classics of writing craft to see you through. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, by Francine Prose In this collection, comprised of a series […]
Dreams From My Father, by Barack Obama Stories that center on fathers have a distinct place in the memoir genre. For better or worse, fathers hold a different place in their intersection of the world and experience. As in Jung’s archetypes, fathers are symbols of worldliness and action. They are […]
Delayed Rays of a Star, by Amanda Lee Koe At a New Year’s Eve ball in 1928, the German-born American photographer and photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt snapped a now-legendary photo of three women: Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl. In Amanda Lee Koe’s debut novel, the impromptu portrait is […]
Ship Fever: Stories by Andrea Barrett The eight stories in Andrea Barrett’s 1996 story collection, which won that year’s National Book Award for fiction, run from historical to contemporary settings, yet there is an essential and unifying voice. Like Edward P. Jones, Jim Shepard, and Hilary Mantel, authors whose work […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.