I talked with the great Jesmyn Ward about Mississippi, Black Lives Matter, and her memoir “Men We Reaped,” recently published in Dutch as “De mannen die we oogstten.”
Read More ...Alexander Nemerov: Fierce Poise
Among all the artists of the New York School, that brilliant and quarrelsome group of postwar painters and poets, Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) stands out for the apparent ease of her artistic process. … Pollock, Rothko, Willem de Kooning must be good, because look what they paid in depression, alcoholism, and self-doubt. Frankenthaler’s stunning canvases challenge […]
Read More ...Ursula K. Le Guin in Melbourne
This week I talked about Ursula K. Le Guin with host Trevor Chappell on Australia’s ABC radio. It was the late-night program, so I was grateful to be able to do it from a different time zone. I talked a bit about Ursula’s visit to Melbourne…
Read More ...The Duke, the Dauphin, and the Donald
I’ve been posting fewer reviews here lately, partly because I’ve been reviewing less (and writing more! I’ve really almost finished my second book). But it’s also because I’ve been working differently. I used to write my reviews for Trouw in English, then give them to my partner, Jan van Houten, to translate into Dutch. That […]
Read More ...Rebecca Solnit: Recollections of My Nonexistence
Can you write an autobiography and leave yourself out? Can you be everywhere and nowhere in a narrative, or slip out of it like you would quietly exit a party? Provocatively, Rebecca Solnit has organized her new memoir around moments when she felt that she was not fully present in her own life: was not being seen or […]
Read More ...On Tiptree and naming
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In recent weeks I’ve seen a discussion taking place around the names of literary awards, with many arguing that awards should not be named after people. One of those awards is the Tiptree. I haven’t wanted to say much about this, mainly because I’m in the middle of revisions for the book that ate my […]
Read More ...Margaret Atwood: The Testaments
For pure reading pleasure ‘The Testaments’, Margaret Atwood’s long-awaited sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” lives up to every bit of the considerable pre-publication hype. Atwood’s original dystopian novel, published in 1985, ends like a Cold War thriller: the main character, Offred, escapes from Gilead, the Christian theocracy where as a “Handmaid” she is held in […]
Read More ...“The Presiding Genius of Her Own Body”
“I was surprised—though I shouldn’t have been—to discover that a book on mothering was also about not-mothering. Yet the problem of an unplanned pregnancy, for women born between 1900 and 1945, is a story that runs throughout my book. Of the women I’m writing about, almost all struggled for access to birth control. Several had […]
Read More ...Suzette Haden Elgin: Mother Tongue
Sometimes a word or phrase enters the language that you didn’t know you needed until it was there […]
Read More ...Valeria Luiselli: Lost Children Archive
In the summer of 2014, the talented young Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli and her husband put their kids in the car and drove from New York City to southern Arizona. Because they were applying […]
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