Tag
Love
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B-Sides: Stendhal’s “Love”
Are you a banker or a manufacturer or an industrialist? If so, Stendhal doesn’t want you to read “Love”; you wouldn’t understand.
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The Metalyrical Moment
Three recent poetry collections have cemented the rise of what we might call the “metalyrical”: poetry that interrogates the conditions of its own expression.
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Quit Playing Games with My Heart
Robert first catches my eye from across the coffee shop. New to the neighborhood, I’m looking for a friendly face. But Robert—glaring back at me from over his mug …
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Translators and Other Icons
Writers are sexy figures. Until recently, we tended to imagine them as drunk and glamorous, Hemingway at the bar in Cuba or Frank O’Hara partying with artists …
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Muses Explain Things to Me
The feminist muse is an artist, too. No silent sitter, she swaps the easel-facing chaise for a work space wholly hers, sloughing off the obligation to inspire …
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The Ambivalence of Appropriation
One day in the summer of 2001, English professor and cultural critic Eric Lott received a phone call from rock journalist Greil Marcus. Marcus had some news …
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Queer Your Own Adventure
“BEWARE and WARNING!” So heralds the front page of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, wildly popular in the 1980s and 1990s. “This book is …
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Love in a Broken World
There are now, it seems, more ways than ever for a woman to reach or ruin her own potential. Mainstream feminism today hinges upon a vision of woman as rational actor capable of logically and authoritatively plotting her own course through life. Of course, it’s not that simple: women run up against intractable barriers, broadly…
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Wild States of Being
A lacquered blue cube and a cat named Labes: these nonhuman characters shed unforgiving light on human frailty in the wrenching new novel by Italian writer Domenico Starnone, Ties, scrupulously …
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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 …
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Workplace Romances
Do what you love. Most American 20- or 30-somethings have heard this helpful tidbit of career counseling at one time or another in the course of our lives. Like many adages, this one is dangerous: it places a burden on young people to invest emotionally in what is, for many, a matter of survival. Consequences…
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Foucault and the Fictocritics
For at least three decades, starting in the 1970s, Michel Foucault was a phenomenon nearly comparable to the Beatles, or his predecessor on the academic scene, Claude Lévi-Strauss. In a history of the leather jacket in the New York Times Magazine, Foucault appears like a god alongside Marlon Brando and the Ramones as a marker…
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The Bingewatch: “Love” Angeles
Despite today’s abundance of “quality television” programming, TV has yet to fully shed its reputation as a degraded medium. Why else would the binge have taken hold as a (if not the) prime metaphor for contemporary television viewing? Where the representative of televisual excess was previously the couch potato, a human-turned-tuber upon cathode-ray immersion, today’s TV-watching…
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Jhumpa Lahiri’s Modernist Turn
Jhumpa Lahiri’s In altre parole announces the birth of a modernist. Written in hard-won Italian and reverberating with the energy of early 20th-century literary experiment, In altre parole describes the transformation of a writer exchanging the patient, polished realism of her first four books for a disquieting abstraction. It is a pleasure to witness sudden…
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A Lesbian “Carol” for Christmas
As we approach the crest of film awards season frenzy, Carol, Todd Haynes’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel, The Price of Salt, still in limited release, has captured the imagination of critics like no lesbian-themed movie before it. Named best film of 2015 by the New York Film Critics Circle, it comes in at…
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Ferrante, in History
What happens when the most ambitious rethinking of the politics of realism in recent memory can’t be attached to a face? (Can they give the Nobel Prize to a pseudonym?) Now that the Neapolitan tetralogy is complete, it’s clear that Elena Ferrante’s decision to remain biographically unavailable is her greatest gift to readers, and maybe…
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Status Updates
How do we read Tumblr pages, Facebook updates, and Instagram feeds for plot? What sorts of narrators do social media enable and promote? The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty by Amanda Filipacchi and The First Bad Man by Miranda July both feature narrators who continually reflect on how they externalize their inner selves. Their worlds function like Tumblr: selfhood becomes…
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A Letter to My Children about the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Marriage Equality
Many parents struggle with how to talk to their kids about marriage equality. In what follows, a former Supreme Court law clerk, top appellate litigator …
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Why “Looking” Bothered Me
In March, after the end of its second season and a few days of intense speculation, the death knell was sounded for HBO’s Looking, the only recent series on American television with a central cast composed mainly of gay characters. Controversial since its debut, the news of its cancellation has only sparked further debate about…
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Love Story
Romeo and Juliet, War and Peace, Wuthering Heights, Portrait of a Lady, Death in Venice: love stories—sublime, tormented, star-crossed or otherwise—are the bread and butter of the Western literary canon. Yet while still a thematic staple of high school English courses and comparative literature curricula, love rarely makes the pages of the New York Times’s…
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Autobibliography
What is reading, especially novel reading, for? What does it mean to love a book or to love reading? These questions hover over the pages of recent bibliomemoirs or autobibliographies that return to formative scenes of reading (Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch); recount “the serious pleasure of books,” as the subtitle of Wendy Lesser’s…
