American Literature
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American Literature in the Trump Years November 25, 2024
Washington Post critic Michael Dirda is depressed. After the election, he couldn’t understand “how to live in a nation governed and controlled by people that even Ayn Rand, let alone Edmund Burke, would despise.”To cope, Dirda recommends literature: ...
So You Want to Be Joan Didion . . . October 23, 2024
To a certain set of young women Joan Didion is something of an intellectual godmother. These women (they are almost always women) are attracted to her knife-like prose and her cool “disassembling of overprecious myth,” as the New Yorker staff writer ...
The Novel Has a Problem With Fat People June 10, 2024
I can’t pinpoint exactly when I began to see fatphobia everywhere in American fiction. It did not come all at once, but little by little. I saw it when I was in graduate school and a man turned in a story where a boy looks at a fat girl and thinks no...
The Sad Life of Carson McCullers May 14, 2024
The novels and stories of American writer, Carson McCullers, are populated by sad and lonely characters. They are perpetually seeking a sense of belonging, yet in some sense, they know that belonging is impossible. They remain outcasts and often meet...
Against ‘Latin American Literature’ May 08, 2024
The region, we’re told, extends from the deserts of Sonora to the straits of Tierra del Fuego, encompassing 7.7 million square miles that are home to 660 million people who share two Latinate languages: Spanish and Portuguese. What complicates the pi...
César Aira’s Magic May 06, 2024
It was the end of 2002, and Michael Gaeb had just founded his literary agency. He was 29 years old and had traveled from Berlin, where he still lives, to Guadalajara, Mexico, to visit one of the major Latin American book fairs. The first morning of t...
Percival Everett’s American Absurd April 25, 2024
On a recent tour of British bookshops, the American author Percival Everett visited Bath. He spent some time signing copies of his most recent book, James, in the independent bookshop Toppings, then went to do the same at another, Mr B’s Emporium, wh...
William H. Pritchard and the Twilight of Literary Criticism April 17, 2024
Ear Training is a retrospective collection of writings by nonagenarian William H. Pritchard, the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, Emeritus, at Amherst College. The author is an Amherst man through and through. He took the A. B. there in 1953 a...
Several Attempts at Understanding Percival Everett April 12, 2024
Toward the end of Percival Everett’s 2021 novel The Trees, about a series of murders in present-day Money, Mississippi, the small town where 13-year-old Emmet Till was brutally lynched in 1955, a list of Black Americans who died by lynching is read a...
Remembering Zora Neale Hurston April 01, 2024
Zora Neale Hurston was a rare bird. A rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno—“a rare bird on this earth, similar to a black swan,” in Juvenal’s phrase—whose larger-than-life persona was a fabulous concoction of myth and reality. Virtually from...
Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Tantalizing, Unsentimental Prophet February 29, 2024
“If an inhabitant of another planet should visit the earth, he would receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human life by attending an Italian opera than he would by reading Emerson’s volumes,” John Jay Chapman remarked. “He would learn from the It...
English for the Dazed and Confused February 23, 2024
When I was in high school in the mid-1970s, first in Rockville outside Washington, DC, then in north San Diego County, a year of classic American literature was a standard thing. These weren’t private schools—I never attended one of those—just ordina...
