Lauren Oyler
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Review: Lauren Oyler's "No Judgment" April 12, 2024
Let’s start with zero theatrics, then spin some up over time. Because there’s no value to theatrics without sense and no reason to make sense if we don’t have fun.I enjoyed Lauren Oyler’s new essay collection No Judgment a lot, and I think it’s a goo...
Lauren Oyler and Literary Criticism in the Age of the Internet April 11, 2024
Like many great literary critics before her, Lauren Oyler wrote a novel as her first book. Published in 2021, Fake Accounts followed an unnamed blogger living in Brooklyn who moves to Berlin after her boyfriend, an online conspiracy theorist, is appa...
The Death (and Life) of Takedown Culture April 11, 2024
Lauren Oyler is one of the most prominent literary critics working today. She made her name, in the last few years, writing acid takedowns of lauded writers like Jia Tolentino, Sally Rooney, and Roxane Gay. In 2021, she published an autofictive novel...
Lauren Oyler Wishes You’d Fact-Check Your Reviews April 10, 2024
I first discovered Lauren Oyler, as many did, when I read her scathing review of Jia Tolentino’s essay collection Trick Mirror in LRB. Tolentino was a writer I felt got too much credit for making facile observations, and I whispered as much to other ...
Star Struck April 10, 2024
“LITERARY CRITICS do fulfill a very important role, but there seems to be a problem with much contemporary criticism,” Simon Leys once wrote. “One has the feeling that these critics do not really like literature—they do not enjoy reading.” This was a...
'No Judgement' by Lauren Oyler — Saying It Like It Is April 08, 2024
Let’s get the title out of the way: No Judgment, Lauren Oyler’s first foray into a non-fiction collection, is as spuriously safe a space as a demilitarised zone. “There is never no judgment, and certainly not in this book,” the author and critic admi...
A Conversation with Lauren Oyler April 04, 2024
The one time I met Lauren Oyler in person was in New York in the spring of 2018. I had been closely following her work as a critic and admired her intelligence and fearlessness. That exuberant night, she sat mostly quietly, with a look of anger, thro...
Lauren Oyler Doesn’t Take Her Work Too Seriously March 29, 2024
Nothing gets the internet—and our depleted attention spans—going more than a good essay. They give us a glimpse into the writer’s psyche and something to talk about. Known for her meticulous and sometimes scathing book reviews, much-discussed article...
Lauren Oyler Wants a Challenge March 22, 2024
“I don’t like posting anymore,” says novelist, essayist, and one of the world’s heavyweight champs of posting, Lauren Oyler. “I got out of that business.” But to paraphrase Trotsky: You may not be interested in posting, but posting is interested in y...
I Could Have Been Harsher March 21, 2024
Even those who have been the focus of Lauren Oyler’s criticism have, at times, admitted the usefulness of a “truly scathing” review of their bullshit. Oyler rode the internet’s appetite for a well-argued pan to prominence, publishing criticisms of Ro...
Criticism in the Internet Age March 21, 2024
I have had an encounter by proxy with novelist and critic Lauren Oyler. My wife once tweeted, innocently, “nothing in the world is better than a husband who is good with children.” It’s true: I am good with children. Oyler quote-tweeted, “Why am I se...
Lauren Oyler's Favorite Collection of Essays March 20, 2024
'The Professor and Other Writings' by Terry Castle (2010)This collection of memoiristic critical essays is by far my most successful book recommendation. It includes a hilarious portrait of Susan Sontag — "Ours was on-again, off-again, semi-friendshi...
Lauren Oyler Cares a Lot, Actually March 18, 2024
“You’ll be happy to know I have beautiful makeup on,” Lauren Oyler told me, “when we’re talking on the phone like old people.”This is a fair lede because it nods to self-presentation and modes of communication, both of which come up in No Judgment (H...
A Critic Has Some Thoughts on Our Judgy Culture March 14, 2024
Let’s get one thing out of the way: I am extremely, ridiculously sensitive to other people’s judgment, largely because, as the cliché has it, I’m my own harshest critic, and thus magnify anyone else’s criticism to a preposterous degree and use it to ...
Lauren Oyler’s Defense Mechanisms March 13, 2024
The American critic Lauren Oyler is fun – very fun – to read. Not just because she is funny, although she is, nor because she is mean, which she can be, though her reputation for viciousness is overstated: her fabled takedown of the New Yorker writer...
My Anxiety March 11, 2024
In her short story “Five Signs of Disturbance,” Lydia Davis writes of a woman who is “frightened”:She cannot always decide whether what seems to her a sign of disturbance should be counted as such, since it is fairly normal for her, such as talking a...
The Slick Lauren Oyler March 11, 2024
Lauren Oyler’s No Judgment is the kind of book that comes with certain quality assurances that read like wine-tasting notes. The essays contained therein will “bring to mind” the oaky aromas of Sontag, the citrusy tang of Kael, and the sharp chocolat...
Things That Annoy Me: On Lauren Oyler's 'No Judgement' March 11, 2024
One of the many cheap rhetorical strategies prevalent on the internet is treating any personal annoyance as if it is a serious infraction. Open Twitter and you’ll see it: professional adults driven apoplectic because an online review misinterpreted t...
On Lauren Oyler's 'No Judgement' March 07, 2024
Lauren Oyler, an American literary critic who writes for Harper’s Magazine and the New Yorker, believes her metier is under threat. “I am a professional, and I am in danger,” she declares in My Perfect Opinions, one of eight previously unpublished es...
Lauren Oyler’s Book Dissects Contemporary Cultural Criticism March 06, 2024
“I think ‘why I’m right’ should be the subtext of any piece of critical writing,” states American novelist and journalist Lauren Oyler in her new book No Judgement. “Sometimes I become energised by a feeling that I need to right some discursive wrong...
