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“Judy Blume: A Life” and the Problem of Biography
When Blume started writing, the market category of young-adult (as opposed to children’s) literature was defined by politically motivated…
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book review
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The Feminist Visionary Who Lost the Plot
Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that she was a person of “superior intelligence and courage.” This fuelled her radical politics—and her…
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Why a Woman Would Rather Love a Statue Than a Man
As Venus educates Rika in the art of self-possession, we are only moderately surprised when Rika informs us, “I was in love with the…
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Sam Shepard’s Enactments of Manhood
In the older Rogers’s case, the alcohol and the trauma worked a deep transformation; he grew paranoid about his family, and would go on…
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The Man Who Helped Make the American Literary Canon
In the nineteen-thirties and forties, young book critics on the make used to crowd outside the office of Malcolm Cowley, the literary…
World
The Nineteen-Thirties Novel That’s Become a Surprise Hit in the U.K.
The town of Schliersee, about an hour south of Munich in the Bavarian Alps, has long been a favored holiday retreat, both for summertime…
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James Frey’s New Cancelled-Guy Sex Novel Is as Bad as It Sounds
The author page of “Next to Heaven,” James Frey’s new novel, breathlessly notes that Frey “was called America’s Most Notorious Author by…
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The Other Side of Sherman’s March
The second hour of “Gone with the Wind,” the bold, almost brazenly romantic Civil War epic that won ten Academy Awards, is largely a…
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A Novelist’s Unnerving Memoir of Disordered Eating
“My Good Bright Wolf,” a new memoir by the novelist Sarah Moss, begins in dishabille. A narrator is speaking to herself in the second…
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The Complex Politics of Tribal Enrollment
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, a former Obama Administration official, was six years old when she became, as she puts it, “a card-carrying…