Tag
Friendship
-
A Brief Queer History of Going to Bed with Your Hot Friends
I worried that, in obscure but consequential ways, I had already begun to fail her.
-
Public Thinker: Nancy K. Miller on Feminist Lives
“Although I was reluctant to generalize about women’s friendship, I was also thinking about a model that would counter the male model of friendship.”
-
Passion and Presence: Maria Irene Fornes, 1930–2018
In 1999, in an interview I conducted with Maria Irene Fornes on the eve of a …
-
Ethnographers of Ourselves
What would you be willing to do for a friend from 20-odd years ago if you suddenly learned they were on the verge of becoming homeless or found them …
-
The Book That Made Me: Learn How to Love
The Book That Made Me is a series about the books that have changed our lives. In this inaugural installment, a National Book Award–winning historian …
-
Feminist Auteurs
“Dialogue memorized, scenes recalled: we became our own insular world of reference and repetition. If you didn’t know the films, you didn’t know us.” This is protagonist Carrie Wexler’s description of her intense adolescent friendship with Meadow Mori in Dana Spiotta’s powerful new book, Innocents and Others. With it, Carrie throws down a challenge to…
-
Antiheroic Feminism: An Interview with “UnREAL” Co-creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro
Sarah Gertrude Shapiro is a difficult person to pin down. With the second season premiere of UnREAL—the Peabody-award-winning series for which she not only writes and produces, but now also directs—on the horizon, Shapiro has made a reluctant entry into the limelight on awards show red carpets, Paley Center panels, and other events for the…
-
Chick Lit Meets the Avant-Garde
Ask the average critic, professor, or reader to name an experimental novelist and they will more likely name a man—Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace—than a woman—Tillman, Winterson, Lessing. Ask them to name the protagonist of an experimental novel and they will probably do the same. Though female authors write experimental novels about women—like Renata Adler’s Speedboat…
-
Sexuality, Counterfactually
Larry Kramer’s The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart is not all that interested in the history of sexuality. At first glance this might seem an odd assertion to make about a novel that …
-
Welcome, Now Keep Out
At first blush, the title of T. Geronimo Johnson’s second novel, Welcome to Braggsville, tempts us with the suggestion of hospitality. Might we be invited into this charming fictional Georgia town, population 712? There we meet D’aron Davenport, a present-day high school senior who has won a scholarship to attend the University of California, Berkeley.…
-
Lotte Eisner Needs to Fly
Early in Werner Herzog’s 2006 film Rescue Dawn, German-born American fighter pilot Dieter Dengler (played by Christian Bale), shot down and held captive by the Vietcong, is given the choice to put his signature to a statement denouncing the war and the “corrupt American political establishment” in exchange for an early release. Dengler refuses, telling…
-
Murderous Schoolgirls
While little girls may be made of sugar and spice and everything nice, in fiction the teenagers they grow into are anything but. We are drawn to stories where girls are scandalous, promiscuous, and even—or especially—murderous, where a sinister drive emerges from beneath facades of propriety and innocence. The dark underbelly of female adolescence and…
-
To Translate Is to Betray: On the Elena Ferrante Phenomenon in Italy and the US
The stunning fortunes of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels in the United States have only recently begun to affect their reception in the author’s native country, giving rise to competing theories and occasionally ugly polemics: Are Italians simply unable to recognize greatness in one of their own? Are American readers uncritically falling for sentimental “women’s” novels?…
-
Murakami on Friendship
It might be fair to say that Haruki Murakami has had two narrative modes in his novels and short stories. Works like Norwegian Wood (1987) illustrate his “normal” mode, in which he recounts a nostalgic, affecting tale of relationship and loss. In his “weird” mode—weird in the eerie, old-fashioned sense—he gives us talking animals and…
-
This Morning Was a Poem: On and Near Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby
Rebecca Solnit’s new memoir, The Faraway Nearby, is a morning poem. Last summer, I sat outside on a covered patio beneath the awning and read it straight through. I read for hours. The book had been widely praised in reviews from the New York Times to Slate, The Millions, and beyond. It would soon be…
-
In Praise of MA (Middle-Aged) Fiction
Reading what we might call MA (Middle-Aged) fiction, it’s easy to see how YA (Young Adult) fiction has become so popular among not-so-young adults. In the face of characters burdened with troublesome children, aging parents, failures of love and marriage, professional frustration (or even more frustrating professional success), depression, cancer, and obesity, who wouldn’t want…
-
Fiction Brief Round-Up
As if the arrival of Public Picks earlier this month weren’t enough, our new round-up of four brief reviews of recent novels offers that many more suggestions for intriguing summer reads: from unlikely friends from Boston with ambiguous relationships to exotic lands, to the “ordinary horror” of living through Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence; from…
