Thoughts on new fiction from Meg Wolitzer and a new album from Ex Hex, short stories from some excellent NYC-based writers, Elif Batuman on marriage and Gone Girl, and more.
A look at Blake Butler’s new novel, interviews with Meg Wolitzer and Mira Gonzalez, adapting an Edith Wharton novel for television, notes on a Sun Ra reissue, and more.
This morning: Meg Wolitzer on her upcoming YA novel, Roxane Gay on reality television, notes on Alex Chilton’s biography, Blake Butler talks crime fiction, and more.
When I was a teenager, I read the longest, most complex books I could find. I spent months trying to decode Finnegans Wake, slogging through In Search of Lost Time, finding Tristram Shandy hysterical, looking up all the references in Gravity’s Rainbow, and marking the margins of my copy of The Waves with so many notes that it became its own kind of illuminated text. In 1995, I remember going to the bookstore the second it opened on the day […]
Sometime in the past year, I started thinking of myself as a year older than I actually am. Whereas before — say, at the age of 35 — I’d end up hesitating, considering 34, and then realizing that, no, I needed to go up a year, I now keep wanting to refer to myself as 37, whereas I’ve still got a few months to go until that birthday comes around. It’s a minor thing, sure, but it’s getting under my […]