Over the span of thirty-two years, Deborah Eisenberg has produced five short-fiction collections, each more emotionally thoughtful and rigorous than the last. Like her past work, Eisenberg’s newest collection, Your Duck Is My Duck, requires not just a reader’s utmost attention, but also a willingness
At first, it might be hard to see the connection between the ten critics profiled in Michelle Dean’s Sharp. Writers such as Dorothy Parker, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, Janet Malcolm, and Nora Ephron were singular talents—each an uneasy fit for any neat label. What links them, Dean
In the autobiographical essays that make up her debut collection, Tonight I’m Someone Else, Chelsea Hodson examines the chaotic and bewildering experience of being an American woman and artist. At first glance, some essays resemble a well-curated Twitter feed— like the single-line, stream-of-consciousness
Keith Gessen’s timely and hilarious new novel, A Terrible Country, arrives ten years after his first, All the Sad Young Literary Men. The story follows Andrei Kaplan, an overeducated, underemployed young academic as he relocates to Moscow to look after his sick grandmother in the summer of 2008. Over
The word essay comes from a French word meaning “to try.” But thinking of an essay as simply an exploratory effort diminishes the form’s deep tradition—one worthy of serious study. With his debut collection, Up Up, Down Down, Cheston Knapp exhibits both a studied mastery of the form and a reverence
Porochista Khakpour’s memoir, Sick, is a deeply powerful and harrowing odyssey through the most profound mysteries of mind and body, as Khakpour explores the roots of a chronic illness that has no clear beginning or end. I was already a great fan of Khakpour’s dazzling novels, Sons and Other Flammable
Ludwig Wittgenstein noted that in representational writing, “one thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature . . . and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.” In Wayne Koestenbaum’s “trance journals”—The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and the newly released
Meg Wolitzer’s new novel, The Female Persuasion, tells the story of Greer, a young college-aged woman, and her famous feminist mentor, Faith Frank. Through the book, Wolitzer explores both second-wave feminism and a younger generation’s responses to it. Along with the novel’s explicit political focus
“The Raincoats were a group of women who were, in part, just learning to play their instruments, but their debut album also coincides with the start of a whole artistic sensibility, one of fearless and knowing amateurism,” Pitchfork contributing editor Jenn Pelly writes in her recent book about the
The human capacity for love is vast and open, yet the word love is often limited: it’s the feeling between people with shared DNA, or the volatile emotion of romance. Mathieu Lindon has experienced life-altering forms of love that defy these categories. In his recently-translated book, Learning What
