Wolitzer’s nine novels for adults all explore, in some combination, modern womanhood, family, relationships, and creativity—subjects with which she is intimately familiar as a woman, wife, mother, novelist, and daughter of a novelist.
The trick in producing a spiritual memoir spurred by disease is circumventing the fact that you have become a cliché: Of course you discovered or rediscovered your god during a grievous bout with cancer—doesn’t everyone?
Andrew Hudgins’s The Joker, part memoir, part joke book, is so fresh and original that it seems without precursor. Like a good joke, it doubles our vision, inserts anarchy into logic, pleases us with its felicities of phrasing, and stuns us...
As soon as I began to ask questions, I realized how much work had gone into no longer asking them, into silences or re-routings, into omissions, not-noticings—into a carefully pruned rhetoric of absence. When I began to realize I wanted...
Not long after I fell in love with my wife, I fell in love with her father. I can’t say for sure if I loved him until after she and I were married, but I liked him from that very first night.
It seemed that every moment winter would touch its own back. The year’s last snow melted in the daytime, budded again overnight from sidewalks and car hoods, consuming into March and then into April days the deep patience of the most...
So much of what forms us is accidental, ephemeral-seeming. When I was young I knew I wanted to be an artist. Sometimes I wanted to be a writer, too, and make books; sometimes I wanted to be a singer.
A nagging question in Frost criticism in the half-century since the author’s death has been where to place him in the larger narrative of American poetry.
For some of us concerned about the fate of sheet music, Song Reader also served as a litmus test of sorts: How many music fans (at least among the sample Beck attracts) still read, or know someone who reads, Western music notation, notes...
