The narrator of Sheila Heti’s new novel Motherhood is in an agony of doubt. She’s in her late thirties. Does she or doesn’t she want a child? Why can’t she make this life decision? When she thinks of having a baby she balks. She’s afraid of giving up her freedom, and besides, how could she […]
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The day before her revolution
In The Village Voice I wrote about another aspect of Ursula, not the homebody but the writer and thinker ahead of her time. Before Ursula K. Le Guin, who died last week at age 88, goes to dwell among the stars — maybe near the constellation that bears her name — it’s worth remembering how […]
Read More ...Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula Le Guin died unexpectedly on Monday, January 22, in the home in Portland, Oregon, where she lived with her husband Charles. After she asked me to be her biographer, several years ago, she and I had many long talks on the phone, met once or twice a year, and corresponded. We talked about my […]
Read More ...Mary Beard: Women & Power
For 4Columns this week, I wrote about Mary Beard and her terrific feminist essay “Women & Power.” Thank you to the unnamed friend whose advice I mentioned, and to another uncredited friend for …
Read More ...A Porlock Day Manifesto
Sometime between October 9 and 14, 1797—let’s call it the second Monday in October—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as he was walking on the coast in southwest England, became ill and stopped to rest at a remote farm. An image had been tugging at his attention, from a seventeenth-century traveler’s tale about China. In this unfamiliar house, […]
Read More ...Jennifer Egan: Manhattan Beach
Another review in 4Columns.
Read More ...Louise Erdrich: Future Home of the Living God
“In this year of feminist dystopia, even Louise Erdrich is imagining the end of the world. For her vivid and suspenseful new novel Future Home of the Living God she borrows from science fiction to write about pregnancy and the control of women’s bodies. She also touches in a new way on the themes that […]
Read More ...Laurent Binet: The 7th Function of Language
A truck, a Paris street, an absent-minded philosopher. On February 25, 1980, these disparate objects collided and fused into biographical fact: the semiotician Roland Barthes stepped off a curb near his Left Bank office and was hit by a laundry van. He died a month later in a Paris hospital. For the resourceful French novelist […]
Read More ...Interview with Paul Beatty
While I’m talking with the poet and novelist Paul Beatty in his Amsterdam hotel, we spot another Booker Prize winner, Hilary Mantel, sailing through the lobby. Both have novels newly out in Dutch translation, and both did interviews the day before for a books program on Dutch TV. Beatty envies her interview skills, he tells […]
Read More ...Camille T. Dungy: Guidebook to Relative Strangers
While pregnant, Camille T. Dungy fears isolation and estrangement: “I felt sure that the woman I’d worked thirty-six years to become would be pushed aside by someone else.” Yet when this poet, professor, public speaker, and holder of advanced degrees becomes a mother, she welcomes her altered identity. Motherhood, she says in her new essay […]
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