Female friendships are not commonly found at the center of the literary novel, but this summer welcomes debut novels by two young, talented writers that place female friendships front and center in their narratives—The Girls from Corona...
As a beginning writer I had a typically naïve conception of style as something added to a finished piece, as if the content is water and style the vase you pour it in—a vase that shapes and decorates but doesn’t alter the chemistry of the...
Lou Marie, my grandmother, is telling this story. It is a story about before, before she was old, before she became the drawl, the accent, the presence behind the white door in her own daughter’s house, with only her hair to keep her from...
Funny Once is Nelson’s eleventh book, and while she’s shown herself to be a deft novelist, this collection highlights the reasons she’s earned a reputation as a master of the short story.
Like other children, I was fascinated by old Lucifer, by his horns and tail, which simultaneously made him sinister and gave him an animal’s grace, by his fire-engine hide, his flame that no fire engine can put out, and above all by his...
Adam Phillips’s new study, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, is an effective breviary and defense of Sigmund Freud, and not because it dazzles with a tightrope act of theory, but because it simply and directly underscores Freud...
From late 1933 to New Year’s Day 1935, Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul with little more than Army surplus clothes, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and some empty notebooks in his rucksack.
