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
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 […]
Read More ...Mark Dery: Born to Be Posthumous
By his mid-twenties, the artist and illustrator Edward Gorey had already settled on his signature look: long fur coat, jeans, canvas high-tops, rings on all his fingers, and the full beard of a Victorian intellectual….
Read More ...A #MeToo moment for Ian Buruma
Grievance, paranoia, and Ian Buruma Many observers in the Dutch press had a hard time understanding the fall of Ian Buruma. My explanation was published in Dutch in Letter&Geest on September 29, 2018. Ian Buruma is out. Our man in New York, the Dutchman who made his name in the English-speaking world with insightful books […]
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