Articles by Elizabeth Minkel
May 20, 2013
George Saunders and the Question of Greatness 9
The hype surrounding George Saunders’s Tenth of December in the early days of the calendar year was kind of staggering. The backlash followed not long afterwards, when it was suggested that someone who can’t seem to accrue enough pages to pen the Great American Novel couldn’t actually be considered the writer of our time. This makes me cringe — maybe because I’m beginning to suspect that it’s true.
February 21, 2013
Stages of Television Grief: On the Decline of Downton Abbey 15
There is something notable about the backlash when a television character is killed: fans take the opportunity to tear apart the writers’ choices beyond the decision to bump off an individual: across the show, all the indignities they’d have suffered through if everyone had been permitted to live.
February 13, 2013
The Kid Is Alright: On Teddy Wayne’s The Love Song of Jonny Valentine 1
Does it matter to us how culture is made? Won’t we swallow the cooked-up laboratory celebrity just as easily as the authentic talent?
December 16, 2012
A Year in Reading: Elizabeth Minkel 1
It’s the sort of book that turns you into an evangelist, in an almost embarrassing way, like, reaching into your purse to wave a copy in peoples’ faces when someone casually mentions, “I hear you’re writing about cricket?”
October 26, 2012
Filming the Unfilmmable: On David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 2
Cloud Atlas is no mere adaptation: it’s a big, ambitious structural overhaul, one that has been likened by Mitchell, amongst others, to a mosaic, all of his Russian dolls smashed to pieces and carefully reassembled.
October 9, 2012
Wickets and Wonders: Cricket’s Rich Literary Vein 6
Cricket fans hate lazy comparisons to baseball, but the literary analogy is an apt one here: if baseball is America, then cricket is—or rather, was—England.