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...
