The Paris Review • 28th September 2020 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.
The Paris Review • 20th February 2020 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.
The Guardian • 8th February 2020 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.
The Guardian • 18th January 2020 Jacqueline Woodson Interview "It's important to know that whatever moment we're in, it's not the first time."
The Guardian • 24th August 2019 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.
MEL Magazine • 26th June 2019 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.”
In These Times • 28th February 2019 Feminism in the Age of Precarity In 1981, Alice Kessler-Harris’ Women Have Always Worked delivered a short, sharp and lasting rebuke to standard U.S. histories that confined women to the domestic sphere. This interview marks the timely reissue of her groundbreaking book.
Vulture • 15th January 2019 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.
Vulture • 20th November 2018 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.
Curbed • 9th October 2018 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.
Medium • 29th August 2018 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.
Curbed • 16th September 2015 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.
Kirkus Reviews • 29th May 2013 What Went Wrong George Packer’s The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America is a story about change and language: the disappearance of the jobs, social structures, and securities that sustained older generations, and the way we talk about that loss.