Ottessa Moshfegh Reads David Means
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The Case That Being Poor and Black Is Bad for Your Health
It was the nineteen-eighties, the height of a certain panic. Reaganism reigned, but even Democrats agreed upon scapegoating America’s Blacks as the source of...
The Trials and Triumphs of Writing While Woman
When the critic Joanna Biggs was thirty-two, her mother, still in her fifties, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “Everything wobbled,” she recalls. Biggs was married...
Hila Blum on Power and Parenthood
This week’s story, “Do You Love Me?,” opens as a woman is standing on a suburban street in the Netherlands, looking through a window...
The Long Afterlife of Libertarianism
In 2001, the libertarian anti-tax activist Grover Norquist gave a memorable interview on NPR about his intentions. He said, “I don’t want to abolish...
Emma Cline’s Vacay-Bummer Novel
In the early pages of Emma Cline’s “The Guest,” Alex, the titular guest, wanders away from a dinner party at a palatial home on...
Martin Amis, Remembered by Writers
In 1987, when I was at university studying English literature, Martin Amis came to town for a reading and signing at the student bookstore....
Can You Love the Art and Hate the Monster?
In 1979, the feminist writer and activist Pearl Cleage was thirty, newly divorced, and dating for the first time in more than a decade....
What Susan Sontag Wanted for Women
A certain anxiety besieges the critic asked to introduce a volume of earlier writings on women, lest she find the ideas expressed in them...