I finally got to see the amazing Alice Neel show, in San Francisco, with my mother, Kit Phillips, who should have been in the picture with me but was taking it instead. I have two in-person readings coming up. On Tuesday, May 31, at 6pm I’ll be at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle. On Wednesday, […]
Read More ...Events
A Room of One’s Own Books in Madison, WI, will host my online book launch on April 27, 6pm US Central Time, in conversation with Chris Kraus, author of the brilliant After Kathy Acker. We’re going to talk about motherhood, not-motherhood, artistic lives, and the art of biography. It’s 1 in the morning Amsterdam time, […]
Read More ...Jennifer Egan: The Candy House
Your mileage may vary, but I Ioved A Visit from the Goon Squad and I love Egan’s new book, The Candy House, even more. It keeps verging on being another boring dystopia and then, happily, going off into a much more interesting space. Read more at 4columns.org.
Read More ...Doubleday, Virago, Ursula: 2026?
As soon as The Baby on the Fire Escape comes out, I plan to start working on the biography of Ursula K. Le Guin. After talking to several wonderful editors I recently found homes for that book at Doubleday (US) and Virago (UK). I’m excited to be working with Thomas Gebremedhin and Rose Tomaszewska respectively. […]
Read More ...Bette Howland: W-3
Lack of confidence is not what characterizes Bette Howland’s work. It’s more like an underlying assumption that she isn’t quite the right person: an anxiety of identity that first creates writers and then undermines them. It’s a second-guessing game…
Read More ...A Mirror for Restless Souls: On Biography
I wrote for Trouw about the pleasures of reading and writing biography, especially its power to recognize the undone-ness of ordinary lives. English version coming soon; the Dutch version is online at Trouw.nl.
Read More ...April 26: The Baby on the Fire Escape
My second book is coming out in April! A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, The Baby on the Fire Escape illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary life.
Read More ...Louise Erdrich: De nachtwaker
I reviewed Erdrich’s stunning The Night Watchman for Trouw. “Layer by layer, incident by incident–a kiss, a funeral, a political meeting–Erdrich builds an intimate and powerful narrative about American history in all its troubled beauty.”
Read More ...Louise Erdrich: The Sentence
At the beginning of The Sentence, Louise Erdrich’s darkly funny and wickedly brilliant new novel, an Ojibwe woman named Tookie faces a long prison term for illegally transporting a dead body. She looks up the word sentence and stares miserably at “its yawning c, belligerent little e’s . . . its hissing sibilants and double […]
Read More ...Jesmyn Ward
I talked with the great Jesmyn Ward about Mississippi, Black Lives Matter, and her memoir “Men We Reaped,” recently published in Dutch as “De mannen die we oogstten.”
Read More ...