Literature Archives - Page 4 of 13

Literature

A Termination

An excerpt from A Termination by Honor Moore: a memoir about choice, loss, and identity

December 9, 2024 • by Honor Moore

He bends to look in.It comes to me now that right then, the gynecologist asks again if I want to do this, and I say yes. Did you waver? asks a voice in my head. I want to say no, and that is correct. I did not waver.Are you sure?Yes. ...

Health care

Her Choice

Honor Moore discusses the decision that shaped her life as a woman and a writer

December 9, 2024 • by Honor Moore and Elide Vincenti

In 1969, Honor Moore was a 23-year-old graduate student at Yale School of Drama when she made the profound decision to end an unintended pregnancy—an experience that would shape her life and work. In her memoir A Termination (Public Space Books), Moore reflects on this pivotal moment while embarking on ...

Capitalism

Reconstructing Capital

The politics of translating Marx

December 6, 2024 • by Gant Roberson and William Clare Roberts

Gant Roberson interviews William Clare Roberts about the evolving relevance of Marxist theory with the latest translation of Capital. ...

Feminism

Christine de Pizan and Women’s Tongues

Why do women bleed milk?

November 25, 2024 • by Chiara Bottici

I am doing it again. Teaching Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. As I always do, I asked at the beginning of class who knew the work before our “Philosophy and Literature” class. This time, a positive surprise! One student had been introduced to de Pizan’s ...

Literature

Stranger Than Fiction

An excerpt introducing “a story of translation in the largest sense”

November 22, 2024 • by Edwin Frank

This book began over the kitchen sink a long time ago. I was doing the dishes after dinner. A CD of Radiohead’s album Kid A was playing, which got me thinking about a recently published book, The Rest Is Noise, by the classical music critic (and Radiohead fan) Alex Ross. ...

History

Why the Twentieth-Century Novel Is Stranger Than Fiction

“An exploding form in an exploding world”

November 22, 2024 • by Mitchell Abidor and Edwin Frank

In the years that Edwin Frank has been at the head of New York Review Books Classics, he has revived forgotten or out of print novels like John Williams’s Stoner and Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate. He has also made available the work of previously unknown authors from America and ...

Why the Twentieth-Century Novel Is Stranger Than Fiction

Europe & Central Asia

The Sword Is Mightier Than the Pen

An interview with Margaret Atwood

October 2, 2024 • by Margaret Atwood and Aaron James Wendland

This interview was conducted as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic ...

Literature

Why It’s Hard to Write About Joyce Carol Oates

At 85, the author is still too quick for her critics

September 25, 2024 • by Alexander Sorondo

One of the challenges for a reviewer looking to write about Joyce Carol Oates’s most recent books is the context of her larger body of work, which is so huge that a mere mention of it can eclipse the new release. The two titles released this year join more than ...

Why It’s Hard to Write About Joyce Carol Oates

Literature

Poet Paisley Rekdal Summons the Lost Voices of Chinese Railroad Workers

Poetry on the landscape of race, past and present

September 24, 2024 • by Aditi Bhattacharjee

The transcontinental railroad—one of the great engineering feats of US history—was laid thanks to the labor of Chinese immigrants: between 1865 and 1869, some 12,000 Chinese workers constructed the western line. Yet very little evidence remains in the words of the workers themselves. “This is not to say there are ...

Poet Paisley Rekdal Summons the Lost Voices of Chinese Railroad Workers

Higher Ed

Camille Bordas’s Latest Novel Follows Comedians on the Hunt for Material

A novelist questions the price artists pay when mining personal life for inspiration

September 20, 2024 • by Emma Minor

The Material opens with a classroom of aspiring comedians workshopping their latest creations: “On Wednesdays, three of them had to perform, in turn, a four-to-six-minute routine that the whole class then proceeded to rip apart, joke by joke, beat by beat, until there wasn't anything left and the budding comedians ...

Camille Bordas’s Latest Novel Follows Comedians on the Hunt for Material

Literature

Very Far From the Homeland

On contemporary readings from Etel Adnan, Mahmoud Darwish, and Alice Oswald exile in the Iliad

September 4, 2024 • by Lyndsey Stonebridge

One of the cruelties of the Iliad is how alive each person is made to appear just before they are killed. That is the point of Homer's long, detailed lists of Greeks and Trojans: names, deeds, parents, brothers, spouses, children, lovers, skills, bad hair, swift feet, words, and weapons. The poem about ...

Literature

A New Media Artist from Tehran at The New School

Her photographs and poetry make the ordinary seem extraordinary

July 3, 2024 • by Alexia Underwood and Zohreh Zadbood

Persian poetry is a treasure. I never thought that I would be interested in poetry in any other language, but when my soul encountered English poetry, I felt a new magic....