Dear Nicole, Most of the time, we tend to think of fiction as a mirror held up, facing reality. Never mind if this is a clear mirror, a cloudy or an openly distorted one – our gaze rarely changes direction. Some books, however, attempt to cross through the looking-glass: they direct our gaze away from…
Month: March 2018
Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss (August 18, 1974) is an American writer. Krauss majored in English at Stanford University. She has a Master’s degree in English from Oxford University and one in art history from London’s Courtauld Institute. In 2007, Krauss was named by Granta one of the best young American novelists; in 2010, The New Yorker included her on its 20…
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
Dear Robert, Something strong and heavy built upon a void: that’s what your poem “Directive” looks like for me. You are at the heart of paradox, that’s the place where you are writing from: “a house that is no more a house, / upon a farm that is no more a farm/ and in a…
Robert Frost
Robert Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. Frost enrolled at Dartmouth College, in 1892, and later at Harvard University, from 1897 to 1899, but never earned a formal college degree. He worked as farmer and English teacher at the local school. Later, he taught English at Amherst College and at the University of Michigan, and served as…
That resistance that runs under the surface of so many great female writers’ books
To speak as a man on the page “(…) A young woman grows in the world knowing that she will have to fight for her right to authority, while around her others shrug it on without any effort at all, like a coat. An expensive coat, that buttons left to right, which is also the…
Franz Kafka is Dead
Dead “Franz Kafka is Dead He died in a tree from which he wouldn’t come down. “Come down!” they cried to him. “Come down! Come down!” Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. “I can’t,” he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. “Why?” they…
What can literature do that nothing else can?
This chance to become something “I think there were many things involved, but looking back, there must have been some sense that not only was writing a chance to express myself (…) I think it was something else, I think I recognized it was a chance to create myself. To actually decide for myself, who…
Because what is a question but a voided space?
Lost in the woods “We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know…
the flood of my affection
this silence like ova bursting in my mouth, my eyes windows shivering behind the storm just before the break I lean my face into the glass pane, something trembles in your gaze, an imperceptible gap: I go through it, my mouth full of shrapnel my chest…
The point is not to negate reality, but to peel back its scrim,
Dear Chloe, Your novel The Immortalists (2018) seems to be cursed by the very premise it seeks to explore: the interplay between chance and destiny is not an easy subject to tackle. Your somewhat tamed approach to it, however, is a bad omen. The book is a decades-spanning story of a Jewish immigrant family. It…
Chloe Benjamin
Chloe Benjamin (1990) is an American author. She graduated from Vassar College and earned a M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She teaches workshops on publishing. Books The Anatomy of Dreams (2014) The Immortalists (2018)
The Classics Spin #17
Hello, lovely readers! It’s time for another Classics Club Spin! Participants post a list of 20 books on their Classics Club list. On Friday morning (March, 9th), a random number will be selected by the Club. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List, by April 30th, 2018. Here is my…
We’re ourselves, and what does it signify?
Dear Elizabeth, Your book The Runaway (1872) is a Victorian children’s novel that quietly subverted everything I normally expect from the genre. The story revolves around a pair of children. The fifteen-year-old Clarice is the only daughter of a widowed merchant. One day, while strolling through her garden, she comes across a mysterious girl, Olga (the…
Elizabeth Anna Hart
Elizabeth Anna Hart (née Smedley, 1822-1890) was an English writer, also known as Fanny Wheeler Hart. Books Try, and you Will: a Story for Youth, 1859 Mrs. Jerningham’s Journal, 1869 The Runaway: a Story for the Young (1872) A Very Young Couple, 1873 Paws and Claws: Being True Stories of Clever Creatures, Tame and Wild, 1874 Miss Hitchcock’s…
