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.

I’m thrilled to have a book review on 4Columns, a new site for arts criticism at its best and liveliest. I wrote about “The Art of Waiting,” by Belle Boggs, an empathetic and brave memoir on mothering, fertility, and the politics of assisted reproduction. Read it now at 4columns.org.

I was nineteen when I first read ‘Crow’, and it probably marked me for life. Ted Hughes’s 1970 cycle of poems about a mythical, shamanic, monstrous creature was violent, cynical, despairing, and nasty, and therefore both troubling and deeply satisfying to my adolescent mind. The poems were […]

In my first draft of this review I said ‘Fates and Furies’ was both brilliant and boring. My editor said, “If it’s a bad book we shouldn’t run a long piece on it.” I said, “It’s not bad. I didn’t say it was bad. It’s original and terrifically inventive. It’s just got slow patches and […]