Sascha Goluboff In a review of Jayne Anne Phillips’ 2023 novel Night Watch for the New York Times , Dwight Garner complains that he “often had little idea what was happening for pages at a time. Pronouns go for long walks without antecedents. Phillips destabilizes her narrative, then destabilizes it again. Reality slides like furniture on an ocean liner during a storm.” However, I found that it is exactly this slipperiness that holds the clue to the meaning and genius of the

Elizabeth Huey Originally published in 1960, 10:30 on a Summer Night captures Marguerite Duras at her most cinematic, where the erotic, the existential, and the storm collide. Two love triangles, a double murder, a crumbling marriage, and a crying baby in a Spanish village just beyond the French border. The world of this short novel is small, but it breathes like a storm. The space feels pulled open by rain and roofs, thunder and chimneys, and an endless search for safety th

Chloe Cook Marianne Moore’s tendency for neurotic revision is evidenced by the leap between the 1924 and 1925 versions of her poem,...

A Fairy Tale by Oscar Wilde Jane Harrington Oscar Wilde wrote fairy tales? That is the usual response I get when I happen to call...

Joseph M. Reynolds It’s not too hard to understand why they don’t publish too many books that have basically no plot, and where the...

Leonard Engel, PhD Professor Emeritus of English, Quinnipiac University In the decade following the Civil War, the exodus of former...

Joseph M. Reynolds A Mrs. Dalloway retrospective is the least I can do. I owe Mrs. Woolf. She remains unabashed, uncompromising, and yet...

Samuel Eric Marx Who decides what genre a piece of written work falls into? What is the classification process like and what literary...