Essays
May 21, 2012
A Goofy State of Mind: My Grandmother’s Letters from Martha Gellhorn 3
by Amy Shearn
Martha Gellhorn’s pen pals included Eleanor Roosevelt, Maxwell Perkins, H.G. Wells, her husband (later, ex-) Ernest Hemingway, and Peggy Schutze, my maternal grandmother.
May 18, 2012
From the Library of Your Soul-Mate: The Unique Social Bond of Literature 11
by Bryan Basamanowicz
The bond formed around a favorite novel is one of shared immersive experience, usually open to impossibly wide interpretations. When we meet someone else who’s “been there,” there’s a biting urge to know exactly what the other person saw, what scenes remain strongest in her memory, what crucial knowledge or insight was retrieved, and what her experience reveals or changes about our own?
May 15, 2012
Confessions of a Literary Jingoist 7
by Elizabeth Minkel
It’s an age-old complaint, but things don’t really seem to be changing. You can seek out literature from just about anywhere — and now it’s easier than any previous point in history — but it’s a hell of a lot harder to bring it into the conversation.
May 7, 2012
Bolaño’s Last, Great Secret 5
by R.B. Moreno
With the close of the post-Bolaño decade, it seems that the tide of the author’s original works is finally ebbing. New Directions’ latest release, much to my delight and that of other genre boundary-watchers, is The Secret of Evil, a thin collection of fictions that occasionally read as essays. Or is it the other way around?
May 7, 2012
In Defense of Autobiography 14
by Jennifer Miller
I spent years feeling like a failure before I’d even started writing, all because I was terrified of producing a cliché. If only I could have written a World War II epic with a chose your own adventure twist.
May 2, 2012
Reference Point: Fathers and Sons 3
by Joseph M. Schuster
If my father could not directly invite me to connect with him, he could find more oblique ways to bring the two of us together: he could give me reference books as gifts, bribe me to open the books he collected.
