In nearly every story in “The Beautiful Indifference,” Sarah Hall achieves a fine balance of language and subject matter. Sometimes the sentences are introverted and brooding, the setting ominous. Sometimes the words are as stubborn and glowering as the characters they describe. Hall finds beauty in unlikely places: in a sudden outburst of rage, or […]

When twenty-year-old beatnik Patti Smith first moved to New York with Rimbaud’s Illuminations in her pocket, she fell in love with a boy named Robert Mapplethorpe. Later she would become a rock star, he a provocative photographer who aestheticized the gay male body. But in the summer of 1967 he was an art student in […]

Fertility without end in the rain forest? Female sexuality as a swamp? It’s an old metaphor in male writing about women: the female body that traps men like quicksand. But it’s also one that women writers have begun using for their own experience. German writer Charlotte Roche called them “wetlands”: the sites of a fecundity […]

“There but for the” was my best book of the year for the Voice. It was a novel I not only admired but enjoyed and read with pleasure–a surprisingly rare combination. It had no boring bits in the middle. https://www.villagevoice.com/2011/12/21/the-best-books-of-2011/

Madeleine Hanna loves books. On the very first page of “The Marriage Plot,” Jeffrey Eugenides shows us her bookshelves, full of old-fashioned authors—Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Dickens, Henry James—whose works are meant to mark her as both a serious reader and an “incurable romantic.” On the next few pages, we discover that Madeleine has […]

At an unsuccessful dinner party in an expensive house in Greenwich, London, a man named Miles excuses himself just before dessert, goes upstairs, and locks himself into the spare bedroom. When his hosts, a materialistic couple called Genevieve and Eric, discover him there, he declines to come out. He pushes a note through the crack: […]