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 ...Alexander Nemerov: Fierce Poise
Among all the artists of the New York School, that brilliant and quarrelsome group of postwar painters and poets, Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) stands out for the apparent ease of her artistic process. … Pollock, Rothko, Willem de Kooning must be good, because look what they paid in depression, alcoholism, and self-doubt. Frankenthaler’s stunning canvases challenge […]
Read More ...Bernardine Evaristo
“Girl, Woman, Other” came out of a feminist impulse, which was to create these multiple narratives from women’s perspectives. But I also wanted to see…
Read More ...500 Mice
My beloved friend Krishna–who first introduced me to Born in Flames, the 1983 feminist science fiction film by Lizzie Borden–asked me to be on a panel on the film in the Samen Tegen Racisme (Together Against Racism) series, Pakhuis de Zwijger, November 20, 2020. I appeared together with Gina Lafour, Shishani Vranckx, and moderator Manjit […]
Read More ...Ursula K. Le Guin in Melbourne
This week I talked about Ursula K. Le Guin with host Trevor Chappell on Australia’s ABC radio. It was the late-night program, so I was grateful to be able to do it from a different time zone. I talked a bit about Ursula’s visit to Melbourne…
Read More ...The Duke, the Dauphin, and the Donald
I’ve been posting fewer reviews here lately, partly because I’ve been reviewing less (and writing more! I’ve really almost finished my second book). But it’s also because I’ve been working differently. I used to write my reviews for Trouw in English, then give them to my partner, Jan van Houten, to translate into Dutch. That […]
Read More ...Rebecca Solnit: Recollections of My Nonexistence
Can you write an autobiography and leave yourself out? Can you be everywhere and nowhere in a narrative, or slip out of it like you would quietly exit a party? Provocatively, Rebecca Solnit has organized her new memoir around moments when she felt that she was not fully present in her own life: was not being seen or […]
Read More ...On Tiptree and naming
In recent weeks I’ve seen a discussion taking place around the names of literary awards, with many arguing that awards should not be named after people. One of those awards is the Tiptree. I haven’t wanted to say much about this, mainly because I’m in the middle of revisions for the book that ate my […]
Read More ...Margaret Atwood: The Testaments
For pure reading pleasure ‘The Testaments’, Margaret Atwood’s long-awaited sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” lives up to every bit of the considerable pre-publication hype. Atwood’s original dystopian novel, published in 1985, ends like a Cold War thriller: the main character, Offred, escapes from Gilead, the Christian theocracy where as a “Handmaid” she is held in […]
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