Fascinating: two gifted women storytellers, feeding on cataclysm. The American Laura Van den Berg, in Find Me, looks to the future, more or less; she imagines a plague that decimates an otherwise familiar United States.
First, a distinction. When I employ the term academic in what follows, I will not mean the first definition, the technical one: individuals who teach college students. I will mean the second definition, the sullied one: individuals for whom...
One night, she turns the novel’s last page. This is all— small house, plain street, some trees, sweet and irksome neighbors, dishes, bills, water leaks,
Jamaicans are primed to contend with all who speak ill of their country. As someone who grew up and lived in Jamaica until my midtwenties—although I now live in the US—I understand how the culture reacts to criticism.
Master of the short story Charles Baxter has a new collection of linked stories, There’s Something I Want You to Do, out this February from Pantheon. Each of the ten stories is named for a virtue or a vice, and we’re proud to publish...
This was more than thirty years ago. In those days, I could not afford a desk and lamp or a library to put them in; but even if I could, I believe I would have run from that. I preferred to travel lightly, to carry only pencils and a...
