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 enough to pay attention. She sifts plot and character to reveal truth with wry humor: “Heaven is not likely to send a desperate, strong-willed woman of thirty an interesting, unmarried man.” As Hardwick explores numerous works of great writers, she is always sensitive to the challenges women have faced, but she resists blaming sexism. In the ess

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 between, and the way aging adults cope with (or try to deny) that grim reality drives the plot of this book. Some try to shore up treasure in this life, some cling to relationships, some maintain a scientist’s neutrality, while others let their pain bring them closer to their God.  In the introduction to my Virago edition, A.L. Kennedy writ

Benjamin Taylor’s brief biography of Willa Cather serves as a useful companion piece to Cather’s novels and letters. Taylor offers insights into Cather’s development as a writer, the themes that brought her into her full power, and her carefully guarded relationships with Isabelle McClung and Edith Lewis. Conscientious about labeling his hypotheses as unprovable, he considers Cather’s private emotional life with respectful percipience, honoring a woman who is protective of he

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...

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

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