“Historical novel” isn’t quite the right term for this book, which strips that particular genre down to bare bones… To this portrayal of enslavement at its most brutal, Ward adds an element of the fantastic, using it—like recent writers from Colson Whitehead and Kaitlyn Greenidge to adrienne maree brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs—to ask questions […]
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Le Guin’s Lavinia in Dutch translation
Strijd en de man, dat bezingt de Romeinse dichter Vergilius al vanaf de eerste woorden in zijn Aeneis: arma virumque cano…. Twee millennia later wordt de gewapende strijd niet meer volmondig door dichters geroemd, en ook over de centrale rol van de man worden vragen gesteld. De Amerikaanse schrijver Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) werd […]
Read More ...Mother and the Wolf
Once upon a time, I was trying to tell a story, only I didn’t know how it went. There wasn’t a main character, there wasn’t an adventure, and when I tried to begin the story I just disappeared into one thing after another. “Happily ever after”—after what?
I was trying to tell a story about motherhood, and each time I set out from home I got lost in the woods…
Read More ...Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma
…Claire Dederer’s refusal to give Manhattan a free pass leads her deep into questions of representation, honesty, what it means to be an artist, what it means to love art. She takes the reader along with her—in my case, back to my sense of baffled repulsion when I saw Allen’s film in 1979. The love […]
Read More ...The Mind-Mother Problem
When I became a mother, it was the most grown-up thing I’d ever done. By age 33 I’d held down jobs and signed a book contract. I’d moved to a new city for the man I loved. The two of us had bought a refrigerator. The two of us had bought a refrigerator. But having a baby was clearly a vastly larger acquisition. It felt like a powerful act of self-definition. So why had I not taken charge of my life so much as lost my way in it?
Read More ...De kleine Morrison
Kleine ode aan een groot auteur: Neske Beks legt uit hoe je Toni Morrison leest Het genie van Toni Morrison (1931-2019) is makkelijk te ervaren, maar lastig te doorgronden. Haar poëtische taal, gelaagde verhalen en thema’s als identiteit, familie, liefde, verbondenheid en uitsluiting zorgen ervoor dat de betekenissen in haar romans zich ver onder het […]
Read More ...After Sappho
I reviewed After Sappho, by Selby Wynn Schwartz, for 4Columns https://4columns.org/phillips-julie/after-sapphoat a time when I was staying with and helping a beloved older relative and was absorbed in the bodily and emotional intimacy of care. Although I was very aware of that as an aspect of friendship among women, I thought more when I was […]
Read More ...The Future Is Female
“The haunted mansion stands for an abusive partner, the vampire reminds you of your emotionally draining housemate, the alien is you.” I write about the power of the fantastic and the women who imagine it in my review of The Future Is Female! Volume Two, the 1970s: More Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, edited […]
Read More ...On Writing: Karen Joy Fowler
I’ve been looking more lately at how writers deal with questions of focus and concentration. In my recent interview with Karen Joy Fowler, I asked her about her process. She told me, “I write very much in fits and starts. And you know, that seemed like a problem to me—it probably is a problem—but I’m too old to fix it now.”
Read More ...Interview: Karen Joy Fowler
“Everything that you grow up with seems perfectly ordinary until you see somebody else’s family and you realize, no, this was crazy, this was always crazy.” Karen Joy Fowler talks about guns, families, and the dangers of too much Shakespeare.
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