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….

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 […]

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 …

Another review in 4Columns.

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“The sort of fiction that picks you up and puts you down in another place.” A new review on 4Columns.

“There may be no other writer who could shed so much light on Lowell’s private dysphoria or the public courage of his persistence.” A new review on 4Columns.

Michael Chabon’s new novel is a sneaky self-portrait of a writer pulling off a confidence game. My review is on 4Columns.org.