Essays

Everything Worthwhile Is Very Far Away: An Excerpt from the New Introduction to ‘Poor White’

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Anderson knew the misery that metastasized in the commerce-centered life and wrote this grand, occasionally high-blown novel to warn people.
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Essays

On Anthony Bourdain in a Tearing World

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Mostly I’ll miss him. The way he turned simple food into accolades. How he made his country listen before it spoke and think before it ate.
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Essays

A Great Short Story Has a Pulse: Donald Barthelme’s ‘Game’

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What is the syntax of a mind gone mad? Mass destruction, “Game” suggests, is always in the wrong hands—because such power stains the soul.
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Essays

The Arrangements: Coming of Age with Books

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The violence ends. It was the first time I learned that sex could repair a broken person, like an epoxy.
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Essays

Captain Stubing from ‘The Love Boat,’ My Literary Nemesis

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There was no preprogrammed solution to my dilemma: My novel reviews have been hijacked by a seemingly nice but title-hacking actor from the ’70.
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Essays

Our Florida, Hers and Mine

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It’s often said that Florida is like Eden. Yet it’s rarely noted that eventually the humans fucked up and got expelled from the garden.
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Essays

My Son, the Nonreader

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Perhaps I should have tried to make sure it didn’t end up on that inevitable list we sons compose of our shortcomings in our father’s eyes.
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Essays

Why Don’t Female Spies Grow Up? Women in Contemporary Spy Literature

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This idea that “women are the victims, never in control” reverberates throughout contemporary spy fiction; those who do exist are femme fatales—or martyred.
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Essays

Rivers and Mirrors: World-Building in Nonfiction

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It is a story of conquest in which this forest was discovered by Europeans who could only untap its utopian potential with guns, germs and steel.
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Essays

Shells: Picking Apart Pain and Womanhood

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They were being strong, but not in the way I’d been taught to be strong as a woman: not quietly, apologetically, not while staying in their place. They were being strong against the systems instead of within them. They were saying, doing, wanting out loud—asserting, not apologizing or disappearing afterward.
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Essays

Losing My Grandma and Finding the Words for It in ‘The Sandbox’

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While reading the play, I never thought of American grandmothers; I thought of many Iranian grandmothers who shared Grandma’s fate. I attempted to imagine Iranian mommies and daddies trying to murder Iranian grandparents and found it tragically absurd.
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Essays

Reconsidering Pablo Neruda in Light of ‘The Poet’s Calling’

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The Neruda I loved and cared about was the Neruda who made "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair" sound like it emerged from longing and not from anything that he might do. But this Neruda, who would make up exoticized women to turn into fetishes as part of his creative schtick, made my heart sink into my stomach.
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Essays

But We Are Here: Reading Edwidge Danticat in the Age of #MeToo

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To consider Danticat’s themes of guilt, responsibility, and concealment is to reflect on consent and power outside the legal system and to demand better from men. Rather than indulging female weakness or encouraging female delicacy, men are to be held accountable for their past mistakes.
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Essays

Line, Run, Breath: On Annie Dillard and the Circuitous Work of Writing

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I hadn’t dreamed that the writing itself wasn’t worth saving; losing it all might have made me consider what parts of it were worth remembering.
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Essays

Things that Happened: ‘The Female Persuasion’ and #MeToo

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What Prout and Wolitzer do in their books is paint a vivid portrait of the impossible contradictions that accompany growing up female in 2010s America.
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Essays

The Secondary Mourner

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What does that make us—the former in-laws and spouses? The family friends? We are mourners once removed, like second cousins no one’s ever met. Technically family, practically not.
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Essays

In Praise of the “Starter Book”

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Now, after the sting of selling 200 copies in three years has passed a bit, looking back fondly on my little “starter book,” I’m able to say that even though I didn’t write something that changed lives, I learned lessons that were invaluable to building a career as a writer.
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Essays

“Tales from Here and There”: On Uganda’s Literary Culture

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Makumbi’s success offers evidence that the literary culture envisioned by the likes of Kagayi, Kakoma, and Mwesigire has begun to coalesce not only abroad but, as intended, in Uganda.
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