Culture
A Trollish New Campus Novel Hates Students and Professors Alike
The novel’s main two conflicts center on the university. First, there is an ongoing existential battle being waged between the university…
Tag
novelists
Style
Muriel Spark, the Double Agent
When Spark was in her mid-thirties, in London, she had a psychotic breakdown, provoked by malnourishment and an amphetamine addiction. One…
Culture
Gwendoline Riley’s New Novel Surveys the Wreckage of Middle Age
That repeated “nothing” is surely a deliberate echo of the “ ‘Nothing?’ ‘Nothing.’ ” in “King Lear,” when Lear beseeches each of his three…
Style
The Patron Saint of Oddballs and Delinquents
The New Orleans writer Nancy Lemann conjures scenes of booze-soaked calamity, where everyone and everything is on the verge of rot. Source…
Style
He Wrote a Book About Interviewing. Here’s His Interview.
I want to be able to speak freely, and I want you to be able to speak freely, and in order to do that I think you should have more freedom…
Culture
The Timeless Provocations of “Wuthering Heights” (the Novel)
A great fuss surrounds Emerald Fennell’s anachronistic adaptation, but Emily Brontë’s ruthless text will always have the last word. Source…
Style
How Do You Write About the Inexplicable?
I’m a rational person. I grew up in a family of scientists. My dad, who studied the brain, told me when I was a kid that Santa and God…
Style
László Krasznahorkai and Contemporary Europe’s Perilous Reality
In 2011, I wrote that reading László Krasznahorkai “is a little like seeing a group of people standing in a circle in a town square,…
Style
Richard Price’s Street Life
When I arrived at the novelist Richard Price’s five-story, nineteenth-century brownstone, in East Harlem, in December, the doorbell was…
Style
Rumaan Alam and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Female Protagonist
The writer Rumaan Alam has noticed that readers, especially as of late, can be quick to dismiss novels that have characters they find…
Culture
A Novelist’s Unnerving Memoir of Disordered Eating
“My Good Bright Wolf,” a new memoir by the novelist Sarah Moss, begins in dishabille. A narrator is speaking to herself in the second…