Feminize Your Canon: Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Brief though it was, Alice Moore’s marriage to Paul Dunbar has tended to overshadow her achievements as a writer, even though she outlived him by three decades and married twice more.
Feminize Your Canon: Inès Cagnati
The French writer Inès Cagnati was not unknown during her lifetime, but she was deeply unwilling to play the public role that helps a writer secure a place in the canon, or to spread her fame beyond national borders.
Jenny Offill: ‘I no longer felt like it wasn’t my fight’
It’s early January and freezing cold in New York when I meet Jenny Offill to talk about her new novel, Weather – an innocuous title for something that feels less innocuous every day. A couple of weeks earlier, the temperature was warm and spring-like. These fluctuations in the weather, and the warming trends they reveal, are increasingly unsettling reminders of the climate crisis, and they form the backbone of Offill’s latest novel, the follow-up to 2014’s bestselling Dept. of Speculation.
Téa Obreht: ‘In America, we make progress, then revert in horrific ways'
How do you disrupt the mythology of the American west, with its campfires and cowboys, and its spirit of masculine self-reliance? If you’re Téa Obreht, you add creatures – and people – who belong to the history but not to the myth. You add, say, camels.
What This Journalist Learned About Female Desire by Following Ordinary Women
The description of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women makes it sound like literary fiction aimed firmly at female readers: a lyrical, intimate exploration of the emotional and sexual lives of ordinary women. But Taddeo isn’t inventing her characters’ stories. They’re the result of a decade of immersive journalism, research and countless interviews in pursuit of what she calls “longing in America.”
Marianne Power Read All the Self-help Books So You Don’t Have To
The day after New Year’s is dull and gray, and the whole of London looks like a late-stage hangover. It’s a good day to meet with Marianne Power — a day very much like the morning almost exactly five years ago when she found herself poised above the murky, freezing water of the outdoor pond on Hampstead Heath, ready to take a swim.
FilmStruck’s Alicia Malone Celebrates The Female Gaze
Lovers of the classic- and indie-film streaming service FilmStruck will be familiar with the lively Australian host and critic Alicia Malone. Her passionate and erudite introductions and interviews, onscreen and on the FilmStruck podcast, were central to the recently shuttered service’s mission to demystify art-house cinema.
At Home with Literary Characters: An Interview with Susan Harlan
Susan Harlan’s Decorating a Room of One’s Own: Conversations on Interior Design with Miss Havisham, Jane Eyre, Victor Frankenstein, Elizabeth Bennet, Ishmael and Other Literary Notables is a singular delight for book nerds, design nerds, and anyone who, like me, happens to be both.
The State of the Advice Column in 2018
The advice column ought to be a relic. It belongs to a time when local newspapers were a community’s main window on the world: before widespread therapy, and before Google was around to autocomplete our anxieties. Yet the advice column in the online era remains wildly popular, evolving in form and audience.
The Uncanny Valley
Fifty years ago this year, a small gang of freshly minted architecture graduates decided to do something radical, something they'd been told they'd never actually do for themselves in the course of their careers: build a house with their own hands.
