Merve Emre

Merve Emre

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar AmericaThe Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York TimesThe EconomistNPR, and The Spectator), The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature), and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.


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Writing on Public Books

The Poetics of Democracy: A Conversation with Devika Rege

“This novel is about a collective, but that collective is not the nation. It can only allude to the nation without becoming it.”

B-Sides: Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”

When should a woman kill her husband? I have turned this question over and over …

Public Thinker: Leah Price on Books, Book Tech, and Book Tattoos

Readers today believe that they are living through unprecedented changes in how …

The Ferrante Paradox

Reading Frantumaglia, the new collection of letters, interviews, and occasional prose from Elena Ferrante, I was struck by how often the author opened her correspondence with an apology. “I apologize …