How Do You Write About the Inexplicable?
I’m a rational person. I grew up in a family of scientists. My dad, who studied the brain, told me when I was a kid that Santa and God didn’t exist. (Don’t say anything at school, he…
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novelists
László Krasznahorkai and Contemporary Europe’s Perilous Reality
In 2011, I wrote that reading László Krasznahorkai “is a little like seeing a group of people standing in a circle in a town square, apparently warming their hands at a fire, only to…
Richard Price’s Street Life
When I arrived at the novelist Richard Price’s five-story, nineteenth-century brownstone, in East Harlem, in December, the doorbell was broken. Price and his wife, the writer Lorraine…
Rumaan Alam and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Female Protagonist
The writer Rumaan Alam has noticed that readers, especially as of late, can be quick to dismiss novels that have characters they find unpleasant. But “when a character on the page is able…