As a young literatus in training, I got myself early and often to the Lion’s Head, a legendary and now-extinct writers’ bar on Sheridan Square. Lined with the framed covers of books by its denizens, it offered an atmosphere of boozy bonhomie and the opportunity for literary stargazing of a special sort. (Hey, I’m urinating right next to Fred Exley!) And it didn’t take long before I was told that gin mill’s trademark anecdote: A nonscribbling civilian drops into the Lion’s Head for a couple of beers. After taking in the scene for a while, he remarks to the guy

In 1999, Jenny Offill published her first novel, Last Things, written in the voice of a girl caught between her passive scientist father and her mother, an increasingly unstable fabulist who takes her daughter on the run to nowhere in particular. Startlingly assured in inhabiting a child’s perspective, it was a cousin to another pair of American debuts, Mona Simpson’s Anywhere but Here and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, which were also road-tripping first-person narratives about perceptive girls trying to navigate the reality-distortion fields created by the half-mad women in charge of their lives. Last Things heralded Offill, then thirty, as a

The National Stadium in Santiago. When I was in Chile in the summer of 2001 I stupidly asked a taxi driver, in my bad Spanish, if Pinochet were dead. “No,” he said, and by the way he looked over his shoulder I could see the question made him nervous. “No, he is still alive.” He […]

In 1953 Philip Lamantia joined four other poets for what is probably America’s most famous poetry reading, the word famous, of course, being highly relative when modifying anything to do with verse. Allen Ginsberg’s inaugural presentation of his declamatory epic “Howl” made the event at San Francisco’s Six Gallery historic, while the other writers on the bill—Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen—also took their first step toward wider recognition. For Lamantia, though, the reading wasn’t quite as decisive. Reluctant to offer his own work, he read poems by John Hoffman, his recently deceased friend and onetime fellow traveler in

In “Down with Childhood,” perhaps the most provocative chapter in her 1970 classic The Dialectic of Sex, the feminist-Marxist radical Shulamith Firestone argued that revolutionary women, rather than rejecting motherhood altogether, could find common cause with their children: “The mother who wants to kill her child for what she has had to sacrifice for it,” she wrote, “learns to love that same child only when she understands that it is as helpless, as oppressed as she is, and by the same oppressor: then her hatred is directed outward, and ‘motherlove’ is born.”

Bad enough that a new Norman Rush book appears but once a decade; to be a big tease about it seems cruel. As far back as 2005, Rush was describing his new novel, Subtle Bodies, as a “screwball tragedy,” a book concerned with “friendship, male friendship in particular.” The tease was on, and over the next seven years assumed tantric proportions: It would be Rush’s first book set in the United States and not Africa, and much shorter than his previous novels—the five-hundred-page Mating (1991), and the seven-hundred-page Mortals (2003)—with the action taking place on the eve of the 2003

Kate Zambreno. “I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression,” Kate Zambreno writes in Heroines. “Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order—pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.” To […]