Culture
Éric Rohmer’s Novel “Élisabeth” Is a Precocious Literary Triumph
The undercurrent of unsatisfied lust that runs through “Élisabeth” bursts to the fore when Michel, giving a high-school student named…
Tag
novelists
Culture
A Trollish New Campus Novel Hates Students and Professors Alike
The novel’s main two conflicts center on the university. First, there is an ongoing existential battle being waged between the university…
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Muriel Spark, the Double Agent
When Spark was in her mid-thirties, in London, she had a psychotic breakdown, provoked by malnourishment and an amphetamine addiction. One…
Culture
Gwendoline Riley’s New Novel Surveys the Wreckage of Middle Age
That repeated “nothing” is surely a deliberate echo of the “ ‘Nothing?’ ‘Nothing.’ ” in “King Lear,” when Lear beseeches each of his three…
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The Patron Saint of Oddballs and Delinquents
The New Orleans writer Nancy Lemann conjures scenes of booze-soaked calamity, where everyone and everything is on the verge of rot. Source…
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How Do You Write About the Inexplicable?
I’m a rational person. I grew up in a family of scientists. My dad, who studied the brain, told me when I was a kid that Santa and God…
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László Krasznahorkai and Contemporary Europe’s Perilous Reality
In 2011, I wrote that reading László Krasznahorkai “is a little like seeing a group of people standing in a circle in a town square,…
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Richard Price’s Street Life
When I arrived at the novelist Richard Price’s five-story, nineteenth-century brownstone, in East Harlem, in December, the doorbell was…