Helen Dewitt
Story Stream
Breaking Out of the Walled Garden of Literature December 19, 2022
Like Oyler, DeWitt is prosecuting a more-or-less righteous grudge. (The depressing history of her battles to publish has been recounted many times over, including by DeWitt herself, who says the industry is “committed to the disempowerment of the aut...
On Helen DeWitt’s ‘The English Understand Wool’ November 25, 2022
But there are better ways to think about minor things and the problem of taste. See Helen DeWitt, who writes as deftly as anyone about taste and aesthetic judgement. Herself once something like a minor writer, DeWitt saw her remarkable debut novel Th...
Where to Begin? November 24, 2022
This fall, New Directions – known as a pioneer of American modernism and foreign writers including Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Roberto Bolaño and WG Sebald – published six ‘storybooks’ for adults, or perhaps especially precocious children. The s...
