Emma Cline
Story Stream
True Grift August 30, 2023
WHEN WE FIRST MEET HER, Alex is adrift—literally at sea, floating perilously farther away from shore. “What would they see if they looked at Alex?” she wonders, gazing on the rest of the beachgoers. “In the water, she was just like everyone else.” At...
Behind the Scenes With Sofia Coppola August 29, 2023
There is a particular aesthetic that runs through Sofia Coppola’s work, whether she is turning her gauzy, feminised lens on the southern gothic of The Beguiled or urban alienation in Lost in Translation, the rococo excesses of Marie Antoinette or dis...
Great Exploitations July 10, 2023
Beautiful, disgruntled housewives or girlfriends of rich men are treasured in American literature, from Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening to Oedipa Maas in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. In fact, the appetite for tales of these t...
On Emma Cline's Eerie New Novel May 19, 2023
I was thinking that Emma Cline’s writing reminded me of Cat Power’s cover of “Satisfaction,” where she removed the parts that at first glance would seem like the important ones, the bits that make the song pop. Of course, being left only with the und...
On Emma Cline’s ‘The Guest’ May 17, 2023
One of fiction’s quirks is its ability to conjure a melodramatic afternoon on a sunny beach with just a few choice words, words Emma Cline wields stunningly in her second novel The Guest. Like Sun & Sea (Marina), The Guest is set on a beach—specifica...
‘The Guest’ Is a Vacuous Mess May 10, 2023
The American novelist Emma Cline is a golden girl. She’s known for her gorgeous telegraphic style, and for the $2 million advance and three-book contract it brought her, back when she was a 27-year-old graduate of Columbia University’s MFA programme....
On Emma Cline's 'The Guest' May 08, 2023
Critics were suspicious when Emma Cline shot to fame in 2016, at age twenty-seven, with her debut novel, The Girls. James Wood’s New Yorker review exemplifies the conventional wisdom on Cline that still carries to this day. He wrote that her style “c...
Sink or Swim April 21, 2023
Emma Cline’s new novel, The Guest, opens with Alex, a 22-year-old woman, getting ready to dive into the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean. First though, she turns and scans the beach for a moment, taking it in: the “immaculate” sand, the light that “...
Emma Cline Gets Vulnerable on the Page March 29, 2023
Emma Cline’s writing career took off in 2014 when, at age 25, she sold her debut novel, The Girls, to Random House in a seven-figure deal. Back then, Cline’s main credentials were an MFA—she had just graduated from Columbia—and a Plimpton Prize from ...
