Author Archive
Grace Paley and The Storyteller’s Pain
“Good Night and Good Luck” and “Debts,” by Grace Paley, are kinetic, and suggest more than is on the page: that a good story is one that’s told, and retold, written and read, with the goal of connecting people in different places and across generations, bringing everyone involved some
The Ghost in the Room
Recently published stories by George Saunders and Kate Walbert are about remembering more than they are about the past.
Writing Millennial Technology
The language Curtis Sittenfeld, Olga Tokarczuk, and Catherine Lacey use to describe millennial technology is varied and complex, but reading their works we have the sense that we’ve made something big, rapidly evolving, and somewhat out of our control.
Frame Stories and the Passage of Time
If one purpose of a frame story in a novel is to prime the reader to listen to what might be a long or meandering tale, what’s the purpose of a frame in a short story?
Mystery, Adventure, and Coming of Age
Lore Segal’s “Dandelion” and Karen Russell’s “The Bad Graft” are two expedition stories set in vastly different worlds.
In the Hotel Lobbies of Sam Shepard and Sally Rooney
Hotels by nature are spaces of temporary, transitory, and hard-to-classify encounters. Setting a story in a hotel frees characters to have discussions they might otherwise not have, to do things they might otherwise refrain from doing.
Revisiting Alice Munro’s “Material”
Munro raises questions about the relationship between two things that often coincide in writers: the first is a certain amount of self-indulgence and self-mythologizing; the second is the difficult work of putting aside the ego and observing the world.
Domestic Whimsy in Fascism’s Shadow
Natalia Ginzburg’s 1963 novel is a record of a lost world and a lost way of life. Its insistently domestic narrative style, in its humanizing particularity, is also an act of resistance against the ascendant totalitarian ideologies looming over its characters’ lives.
Exploring the Self in Orlando and The Puttermesser Papers
Virginia Woolf and Cynthia Ozick both feature protagonists who flaunt societal gender-based expectations like marriage and children in their mock-biographies.
How Can We Be Happy in a World Full of Suffering?
Olivia Laing, in her new novel, writes of a feeling that resonates: “She felt blank. She felt blank and mildly hysterical, she was itching to do something but it wasn’t clear what.”