Lovecraft Country runs on a formula: genre clichés—however racist—only need to be painted over, so as to be enjoyed without guilt.
Tag: Literature
Longing for the Writer’s Space
How should readers and scholars look on the tangible traces writers leave behind?
Surviving Hard Times with al-Hariri
Forget traditional “heroes.” The protagonists of some centuries-old stories are social climbers and tricksters, even cheats and cowards.
This Is Not an Essay on Poetry of the Past 20 Years
I am tired of catalogues and catalogue poems, and of surveys and surveillance—though I appreciate a bird’s-eye view of the terrain as well as anyone.
How to Fake a 19th-Century Novel
If Cloud Atlas is any guide, one of the best ways to sound like a bygone novelist is to make your narrator sound like a racist.
The Secluded Self: Sinclair Lewis’s “Main Street” @100
Why did Americans start distrusting small towns? The answer is one book, in which a woman moves from the city—and loses her freedom.
The Realism of Our Times: Kim Stanley Robinson on How Science Fiction Works
“We're in a science fiction novel now that we are all co-writing together.”
Unruly Objects
By making familiar objects strange, two new books of poetry reveal the limits of overly simple critique.
B-Sides: Daisy Ashford’s “The Young Visiters”
A child’s novel can be funny by revealing how much a child does know, after all.
Ferrante Breaks the Frame
A defaced family photograph—with an ancestor cut out—reveals to Ferrante’s new protagonist how women are erased by the words and deeds of men.
The Once and Future Temp
What can the history of the temp-work industry teach us about the precarity of modern working life?
Carolyn Heilbrun Told You So
The late literary scholar hoped the writings of older feminists in the academy would help younger women “name their anger and find companionship in enduring it.”
Stop Defending the Humanities
Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them.
The Euphoria of Influence: Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Marriage Plot”
Rather than try to kill his literary parents, Eugenides embraces as many of them as possible.
Dear Knausgaard
“There’s a passage early on in Book 2 that’s so smug, so macho (in a literary way), that’s so—ugh! I can’t explain it.”
B-Sides: Carmen Laforet’s “Nada”
When freedom will not arrive to us, can we get nearer to it?
Listen Closely: “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” @50
When the Trump presidency ends, and the toll of years of toxicity and mismanagement becomes clear, we are going to need some guidance.
The Worst of All Possible Worlds?
The most interesting science fiction is not about the future at all but about the present.
Reading Black Futures
Digitizing works of fiction by Black writers catalyzes history, so that it can build new futures.
Can a Novel Be Silent?
John Cage's concerts taught us to hear silence. Can novels do the same?
