Intermezzo
Story Stream
Sally Rooney’s Millennials Grow Up October 07, 2024
Some of Sally Rooney’s best writing is about power in relationships: who has it and who doesn’t, who wishes they had it, and who has it but doesn’t know they do. Early on in Intermezzo, her fourth novel, she restages a scenario that will be familiar ...
A Wish-Fulfilment Romance September 27, 2024
An earworm from the time of Covid: the sound of Connell and Marianne having breathless sex, bedsprings squeaking. I’m talking not about 2020’s hit TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s bestselling second novel, Normal People but about the relentless piss-t...
Sally Rooney’s 'Intermezzo' Feels Very Familiar September 27, 2024
It would have been easy, a book or two ago, to blame it on age or circumstance: young writer, whiz kid, former debate champion, writes the same characters over and over, likely loosely based on her or her friends. I wouldn’t have cared for that, but ...
Sally Rooney’s Crypto-Christian Love September 25, 2024
Few writers in our time have provoked the hysteria, hype, adoration, and scorn that Irish novelist Sally Rooney has. And her latest, Intermezzo, is a bona fide publishing-world event that seems unlikely to lessen the controversy. It’s Rooney’s longes...
Inside The Sally Rooney Launch Party September 25, 2024
Something in the air changes when a new Sally Rooney novel is published. Branded bucket hats start popping up on the heads of people on the train carrying The Drift tote bags. Numbered galleys — more exclusive than Fashion Week invites — circulate. R...
Sally Rooney’s Family Drama September 25, 2024
Sally Rooney has become known as a novelist of love, youth, and the combination thereof. Her characters come together as they come of age, in novels that combine romance with heady conversations on the disappointments and injustices of contemporary l...
There Will Never Be Another Sally Rooney September 23, 2024
A few years ago, someone posted a photo of a man walking through Brooklyn with a copy of Conversations With Friends tucked in the back of his trousers, the name Sally Rooney peeking out above his waistband. It was an accessory that telegraphed as muc...
The Incel and the Dreamboat September 23, 2024
As in Sally Rooney’s previous novels, the main characters in Intermezzo fall in love quickly, tidily and passionately. They meet, their outfits are described, they exchange clipped dialogue and are soon free to engage in ever so slightly masochistic ...
Sally Rooney Thinks Career Growth Is Overrated September 23, 2024
The arrival on Sept. 24 of Sally Rooney’s new novel, “Intermezzo,” is one of this fall’s biggest publishing events — not only for the legion of devoted readers hungry for new fiction from the 33-year-old Irish author, but also for the literati ready ...
The Sally Rooney Effect September 20, 2024
On Tuesday, Sally Rooney will publish her fourth novel, Intermezzo, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Each Rooney novel since her 2017 debut, Conversations with Friends, has caused a frenzy in the literary world. Normal People (2018) put her on the lit...
Sally Rooney’s Adventures in Style September 20, 2024
Sally Rooney’s fourth novel is not exactly her best, nor likely to be her best loved. In her last book, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), a character – fresh from reading Henry James – enthuses: “Have you ever read such a juicy novel?” It’s not ...
Are You Cool Enough for the Latest Sally Rooney Novel? September 20, 2024
On an otherwise average Monday in late February of this year, Sally Rooney completely overtook my Instagram feed. Not the author herself (she doesn’t have any active, public social-media profiles) but rather droves of her readers, who flooded my feed...
