After Visiting Friends by Michael Hainey

The Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan recently took memoirists to task with his piece “Journalism is not Narcissism,” which bluntly argued that “journalism is not about you” in the very first paragraph. While Nolan’s piece focused on writers “who decide to base their careers on stories about themselves” by writing essays that are “confessional as attention-grabber,” there is a whole other sort of nonfiction that was ignored in the piece, a kind of personal and reflective reporting that elevates the work above the sort of confessional that Nolan critiques. A perfect example of that style is found

culture December 11, 2012

Life Goes On by Hans Keilson

Hans Keilson's first novel, a bildungsroman set in Weimar Germany, stays with you long after you’ve read it, in part due to its backstory: Published in 1933—the year Hitler took over the German government—by the famous publishing house S. Fischer, the book was soon banned by the Nazis.

Hans Keilson’s story is one worth telling and retelling. The German-born doctor and writer’s years hiding from the Nazis in the Netherlands, his membership with the Dutch resistance during the Second World War, and his groundbreaking work as a psychotherapist dealing with the treatment of trauma in Jewish children after the war are all fascinating topics—all the more so when you realize that he did these things in the first half of his 101-year life (he died in 2011). And somehow, during all of this, he found time to write books. In 2010, FSG released two of Keilson’s novels, 1959’s The Death