Tag
Children
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B-Sides: Rebecca West’s “The Fountain Overflows”
Do you find child narrators–their perceptiveness as well as their misprisions, their loyalties, their prejudices–endlessly absorbing?
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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 …
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Lin-Manuel Meets “Moana”
Disney’s new animated film, Moana, with songs by Hamilton genius Lin-Manuel Miranda, arrived last weekend to great expectations. Would it keep Disney’s musical franchise afloat? Would it continue …
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The Bingewatch: Mother Winona
Since its release last July, Stranger Things has been praised as an “original,” “meticulous” homage to the Great Men of 1980s popular culture (Carpenter, King, Lucas, Spielberg) …
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The Cult of Girlhood
Is girlhood a cult? Emma Cline’s new novel draws on the history of the Manson Family to explore how girlhood and cults both depend on rituals and intimacies. The Girls seems to tell the story of how one man—Russell, the Manson figure around whom the cult centers—can drive girls of “a different species” to commit…
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Comics versus Franquismo
In the late 1960s, dictator Francisco Franco slowly opened Spain to tourism while continuing to obliterate public memory of the retributions meted out after the Civil War (1936–9). I spent those years studying in Madrid, living for two semesters with a Spanish family. My professors were among the most distinguished of those who hadn’t sought…
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“Democracy and Education” @100
The rallies during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign feature exuberant call-and-response exchanges. Denouncing immigrants from south of the border, Trump shouts, “We’re going to build a wall.” He pauses to let the crowd’s emotions storm up. Then he asks, “And, by the way, who’s going to pay for that wall?” The crowd roars back, “Mexico.”…
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Portable and Infinitely Useful
Now that he has passed his first birthday, my son Miles has begun to handle books differently. Instead of gnawing on them, he stacks them purposefully on each other, pulls them off the shelves and flings them into piles, or moves them from room to room, chatting to them all the while in not-quite-English syllables.…
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Once More Down the Rabbit Hole
By all means, celebrate the recent 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by rereading or finally reading the novel and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1872). But do also mark the occasion by picking up Gregory Maguire’s new novel After Alice, a distinctly 21st-century homage to…
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Gaitskill’s Fictions of Disappointment
In “A Romantic Weekend,” a story from Mary Gaitskill’s first collection, Bad Behavior, a man and a woman who are only casually acquainted go out of town for the weekend. The two seem to have met in a bar, or possibly an S/M club, and recognize in each other the complementary desire to humiliate and…
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Quiz: Gertrude Stein or a Children’s Book?
In her essay “In The Great Green Room,” Anne E. Fernald discusses the surprising influence of literary modernism on Margaret Wise Brown, author of the legendary children’s book Goodnight Moon (1946). Or maybe it’s not so surprising: after all, Brown saw children as “an audience sensitive to the sheer elements of the English language.” A five-year-old, she remarked, was…
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Virtual Roundtable on Women Directors
It’s no secret that Hollywood has a diversity problem, especially when it comes to hiring directors …
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Making “Room”: An Interview with Novelist and Screenwriter Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room is the story of a 5-year-old boy who lives in a single room with his mother and has never seen the outside world. Donoghue recently adapted her novel into a screenplay, and the resulting film, starring Brie Larson, has been sweeping up accolades. It’s nominated for four Academy Awards on…
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Primal Scenes
This past year, Yoplait began airing a commercial, entitled “Mmm,” which features a family—a man, woman, and two children—eating yogurt, producing a chorus of “Mmms” as they ingest. The mother emits a particularly deep “Mmm,” to which the father responds with a louder “Mmm.” With the yogurt and spoon in hand, he starts rapidly banging…
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2015’s Most-Read on the Public Books Blog
Now that you’ve had a chance to look over our most popular features from last year, here were the top five most-read essays from our blog: “Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking,” by Christopher Schaberg It’s a phrase that’s parroted endlessly, but is anyone quite sure exactly what it means? “In the Great Green Room:…
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The Woolf Girl
Pity the small back of Alan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy who washed up on a Turkish beach, child victim of the refugee crisis. His photo went viral, sparked outrage; perhaps it will win an award. But as Lidia Yuknavitch asks in her terrifyingly prescient novel The Small Backs of Children, how can we look…
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Can Child Soldiers Be Saved?
Everybody loves stories about child soldiers, it seems, as long as redemption is involved. A memoir about Sierra Leone’s civil war, for example, is not exactly the feel-good stuff you’d expect to see at a Starbucks counter. But in 2007 Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, one of the first…
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In the Great Green Room: Margaret Wise Brown and Modernism
When Goodnight Moon was published in 1946, no one predicted it would become a classic. Its sales began to take off in 1953, and now the book has sold over 14 million copies. I grew up with Goodnight Moon and I raised my daughters on it. The text remains bearable, charming, and even compelling after…
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Why Boys Must Cry
In contemporary Nigerian literature, muscular heroes of postcolonial independence have lost their swagger. Today’s patriarchs read like quaint fogies, stomping their feet about government, money, and gender roles. Chigozie Obioma’s debut novel, The Fishermen, recuperates this toothless archetype with superb grace. His task is not to rescue the patriarch from becoming his country’s flattest character…
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The Price of Great Art
When someone who made good art is accused of being a Bad Mother, can she ever be remembered as anything but a Bad Mother? In 1992, Mann’s book Immediate Family tapped into collective anxiety …
