In her new memoir Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen, Suzanne Scanlon recounts the years she spent in New York State Psychiatric Institute and Hospital. In chapters oscillating between memoir and criticism, Scanlon narrates her own experience while disassembling notions of madness, recovery, patienthood, diagnosis, and the asylum. She situates her story within—and also pushes against—the canon of “crazy chicks,” whose memoirs were published while she was hospitalized in the early nineties. And yet Scanlon’s depiction of her artistic development suggests an appealingly thorny relationship betwe ..read more

About a year ago, I spent a lot of time with a 14-month-old who was learning how to speak. She could repeat certain sounds and occasionally mimic my words, but wasn’t quite able to ascribe meanings to the sounds and words she produced. I told my friends, in earnest, that she taught me more about language than I’d gotten from our graduate seminars on literary theory. I thought of my time with this curious, burgeoning infant often as I read Kate Briggs’s novel The Long Form. The Long Form traces the course of one day in a young mother’s life. Helen gets up after an almost sleepless night with he ..read more

When Jules Gold, the protagonist of Alexandra Tanner’s debut novel Worry, comes home to find her younger sister Poppy lying naked on the couch, covered in ice packs and crying, she knows exactly what’s going on. The reader might be baffled, but Jules understands immediately that Poppy is suffering an outbreak of full-body hives, a chronic condition that has plagued her since childhood. She doesn’t need Poppy to explain her medication dosages or the drastic side effects of the new steroids her doctor has prescribed, and she doesn’t need to be told what to do: call in sick from work, make white ..read more

Down along the creek I remember something Her, the heron hurried away When first I breeched that last Sunday” —from “CR∑∑KS” by Bon Iver It was July of 2016, the year my youngest brother left for college. My middle brother and I were leaving Onteora Scout Reservation, the camp in the Catskills that had been our summer home for more than a decade. When we left, we knew it would likely be the last time we would dive from the docks into Orchard Lake, stoke the longhouse fire, pick blueberries from the patch behind the campsite we had called our own since we were tweens. As we drove through late ..read more

In Mexico City, history bleeds into the present everywhere you look. I live just off a street called Chilpancingo, for example, a word derived from the indigenous language of Nahuatl, which was the dominant tongue in the region until the imposition of Europe. Yesterday, I spent the afternoon perusing the murals by Rivera and Orozco at the Colegio de San Ildefonso, which was built by Jesuit colonizers in the late 16th century. Just down the street from that are the ruins of the Aztec’s Templo Mayor, which was razed by the conquistadors of Hernan Cortés, its stones then used to construct a cathe ..read more

Yomi Adegoke’s debut novel, The List, begins with the publication of the titular list: a crowdsourced index of alleged abusers (think the “Shitty Media Men” compendium of 2017). Caught in the list’s wake are journalist Ola and her fiance Michael, who are held up by strangers on social media as an exemplar of #BlackLove; things fall apart apace, however, when Michael is revealed to be on The List, leaving Ola to reckon with the disconcerting implications, both personal and professional, of the allegations her partner denies. A clever and biting page-turner, The List’s jagged edge is tempered by ..read more

As a writer at work on a book that’s taken far longer than expected—a story collection begun in 2008 now a novel in-progress—I’m interested in how, in a world that values speed, the slow writer learns to tolerate the uncertainty that comes with the long project. Is it possible to tune out the noise of doubt and the proverbial ticking clock when writing goes into overtime? Having lost count of my revisions, and in need of advice, I went looking for other slow writers and discovered that more often than not, a book’s gestation takes place over years, frequently decades. I found too that the slow ..read more

Xochitl Gonzalez’s sophomore novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, draws from the life and work of performance artist Ana Mendieta, fictionalized as the book’s titular character, who was murdered by her husband (and fellow artist) Carl Andre in 1985. Interweaving Anita’s story  with that of an Ivy League art history student named Raquel, set 10 years later,  Gonzalez examines the intersecting, and often opposing, forces of race, power, and art. I talked with Gonzalez about Mendieta’s legacy, her own complicated experience at an Ivy League university, and drawing art from life. Liv Albri ..read more

When I was editing my debut novel, A Sign Of Her Own, a quote from Ilya Kaminsky’s poetry collection, Deaf Republic, kept me company. “The deaf don’t believe in silence,” he writes, “silence is the invention of hearing people.” The quote interested me in part because my book concerned Alexander Graham Bell, a man who is often romanticized as having conquered silence through inventing the telephone. Kaminsky’s quote also resonated with me because I grew up deaf, grappling daily with people’s habit of equating deafness with silence. Deafness was understood by the adults around me to mean a lack ..read more

While Dan Sinykin’s department profile says that his work focuses on American literature the second half of the twentieth century, that limited description obscures the breadth of his analysis in terms of both content and method. His most recent book, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Columbia 2024), describes the history of what he calls “the conglomerate era,” running from roughly 1960 to the present. Bringing together economic and cultural history, public statements from publishing executives, private correspondence between authors ..read more