There’s a pleasure in any place that comes purely from knowing it well. In the country, the feeling is often a private one: that tree, that field, that view seems to belong to you alone. In the city the same sentiment has a competitive, even arrogant edge. To claim a city’s heart—especially if you’re a writer—you have to insist that no one sees it more clearly or takes more joy in it than you.
That’s why literature is so full of solitary walkers…

It’s been fifty years since Ursula K. Le Guin sold her first short story. Since then her books have been read, taught, quoted, thrust upon acquaintances, put at the top of Occupy reading lists. Over the course of a long, unpredictable, idiosyncratic career, she has written contemporary fiction, historical fiction, poetry, and essays. But she […]

No books by women on the short list for the Libris Prize? If it’s any consolation, the gender gap in recognition isn’t just a problem in the Dutch literary world. In a much-discussed recent essay in the New York Times Book Review, American novelist Meg Wolitzer brought up yet again the question of the divided audience. While women read books by men, many men, consciously or unconsciously, leave out the books by women, as if literature were a checkerboard floor that they could cross by stepping on only one color of the squares….

The best-known section of Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel “The Group” involves a young woman from a good family and a contraceptive device. Dottie has just lost her virginity to Dick, a drunken artist she does not love, and who does not love her. She has spent the night trying to work out the etiquette of […]

D.H. Lawrence is famous, among other things, for introducing sex to the modern British novel. Even in the unexpurgated edition of “Women in Love,” the sex scenes are veiled rather than explicit. But by using code words like “desire” and “fulfillment,” and with pace and intensity, […]

A long-legged, looming metal spider, nine meters tall, bears, in its belly, a sinister clutch of eggs. In different versions, it frightens museum-goers in Bilbao, St. Petersburg, and, as of this week, The Hague. It looks more like a prop from a horror movie than a work of art. Yet the artist Louise Bourgeois liked […]

I think I must have been the last person in the developed world still writing love letters. By 19th-century standards I don’t suppose they were very romantic. J. and I were children of a less gushy, more cynical age. We had already gone way beyond kissing each other’s letters, but felt we were being very daring—stepping over an invisible line of appropriate distance and refusal to hope—on the rare occasions when we wrote “I love you.”

The point is, we wrote letters. Long ones, handwritten, with stamps…

Our 5-year-old daughter is angry. At bedtime we’ve been reading out loud to her from Donald Duck comics. But now her 8-year-old brother is jeering, “Girls can’t be in the Junior Woodchucks. The Junior Woodchucks are for boys. The Chickadees are for girls.” That seems fair: one scouting group for boys, one for girls. But since the stories in the comics are never about the Chickadees, all my daughter can do is withdraw in tears of frustration. She doesn’t belong to the club that counts….