Essays
September 1, 2010
Reading and Race: On Slavery in Fiction 3
by Edan Lepucki
As a white reader, I’m simultaneously made to understand the experience of slavery, and I also must wrestle with how I’m implicated in that past.
August 26, 2010
Oral History at the End of the World: World War Z and its Cousins 2
by Darryl Campbell
World War Z is not a shallow book by any means. But World War Z never quite manages the same level of moral pique as The Good War and the now obscure former bestseller Warday, a bleak speculative oral history of America after a nuclear attack.
August 23, 2010
Beauty, Youth, and Their Discontents 1
by Ujala Sehgal
Fictional characters enjoy exaggerated attributes, but few have the sort of beauty that marks Julien Sorel, where the beauty is not only essential to his character, elevating his soul, but outside of it, dictating his destiny. If beauty can be distilled from its specific fictional forms, does it have a cogent power of its own in literature?
August 20, 2010
On Coincidence, Love, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being 5
by Bezalel Stern
Death is hidden somewhere in the middle of the book, and it doesn’t mean a thing.
August 19, 2010
The Ballad of David Markson: A Primer 14
by Colin Marshall
What might you have already read that suggests you’ll like David Markson? Tough call, since, for good or ill, nothing’s like David Markson.
August 17, 2010
Where We Write: The Merits of Making Do 31
by Jessica Francis Kane
I began to suspect I was too susceptible to the idea of the “writer’s desk” and decided it might be better to do without one. Somewhere along the way, I began to work in libraries. More important, I began to get work done in libraries.
