In the Beginnings of Emotion Exists an End: on Katy Lederer’s The bright red horse—and the blue—
And since the genesis of the objective body is only a moment in the constitution of the object, the body, by withdrawing from the objective world, will carry with it…
In the gap between writer and reader, the novel comes to life
There’s an exercise I sometimes get members of book groups to do: I ask each of them to draw a picture of the cabin from my first novel, Our Endless…
“I Am Not Your Muse” and Other Lies Our Teacher Told Me
Colleen McClary’s crimson lips upturned at the corners. “I am not your muse and every good story is based around a problem.” I thought she looked like a beautiful witch….
The Light of Possibilities: On Patrick Park’s Tucumcari
From the opening sentence of Patrick Parks’ remarkable debut novel Tucumcari, readers are invited into the bewildered reality of a man whose life exists in an interwoven fabric of the…
It Puzzles the Will: Hamlet and Suicide
Madeline Levine, the celebrated author of Teach Your Children Well, recently gave a talk to the faculty of three loosely aligned independent schools, including my own. She said a lot…
Weather Democracy
Twenty-first century Americans face two seemingly separate and intractable crises, either one of which could bring the modern way of life, and perhaps many lives as well, to an end….
The Wind on Mors Island
Last year, at age 90, Knud Sørensen put out his fourteenth poetry collection to go along with his 35 other works of biography, novels, short stories, essays, and memoir. After…
Szymborska as Prophet
There is a stark difference between the universal and the cultural, the true and the rational, and voice and language. In The End and the Beginning, as in her other…
The Novel is dead, long live the novel
Novelists announce the death of the novel with such sinister regularity you’d be forgiven for thinking they can’t wait to find themselves out of a job. It’s a cyclical theme,…