Elizabeth Hardwick’s essays are filled with quiet insights, so quiet that I had to read them in the mornings, when my mind was fresh...

I took my time with this book, steadily working through the exercises, using them to think about books I’ve read, to explore complicated...

There aren’t many likeable characters in Memento Mori . I counted three. But death comes for the likeable, the despicable and everyone in...

Benjamin Taylor’s brief biography of Willa Cather serves as a useful companion piece to Cather’s novels and letters. Taylor offers...

Reading these letters —  just a few at a time on most evenings —was like hearing from a distant friend who is by turns cranky (especially...

This collection was my introduction to Alice Munro's work and it taught me that the true pleasure in reading short stories is to take...

In Lauren Groff’s Matrix, there’s a wonderful character called Nest. From her name to her every action, she embodies the healing,...

In one of Steven Forrest’s books, he mentions that every astrological sign could be reduced to a few clichés. That cliché might be a...

“The position of unmarried women—unless, of course, she is somebody’s mistress, is of no interest whatsoever to the reader of modern...

Writers write about writing a lot more than I realized. Take The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . According to an article in The Guardian ,...

Great Story Coaching * outlines the 3 ways we tend to narrate our lives to ourselves. The victim story (similar to Parul Sehgal’s...

About halfway through My Lives by Edmund White, I expected to give it a two-star rating. White spends so much time narrating his abject...

Barbara Pym wasn’t a Penelope Fitzgerald fan. In a letter to Phillip Larkin, Pym writes , “I read Penelope Fitzgerld’s The Book Shop,...

As a biographer Megan Marshall plays very close to the vest. She doles out her subject in single words or phrases, holds stories out of...

Penelope Fitzgerald writes such quietly brutal books. Florence Green with her naivete and kindness says toward the end of The Bookshop,...

Early in Vita Sackville-West's All Passion Spent , the elderly protagonist Lady Slane says, “Besides, I have considered the eyes of the...

In Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde uses the erotic, or what Mary Karr might call the carnal, to deeply embed herself in her...

Accomplishment is one of the ways we measure our lives, but in terms of what gives meaning to our lives, accomplishments are often merely...

There’s a great passage in Manifesto: On Never Giving Up where Bernardine Evaristo declares “In spite of what my father endured, he never...

Imagine that Joyce Carol Oates*—who does not seem the type to sit with an astrologer, but let’s pretend—came to see me for a New Year’s...