At the age of eighty-five, Vivian Gornick feels she still has unfinished business. “The effort required to attain some semblance of an integrated self”, she writes, is “the task…
nonfiction
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Part intro to Russian literature, part musings on craft, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is all pleasure. Best known for his surrealist short stories and Man Booker…
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Since Donald Trump ascended to the Oval Office in spite of his crude “locker-room talk”, masculinity has been a hot topic. As three new books demonstrate, the causes and consequences…
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Home, as James Baldwin wrote, is perhaps ‘not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’. Sarah M. Broom’s National Book Award-winning memoir The Yellow House is a sweeping social…
As the theologian Paul Tillich defined the distinction, loneliness is the pain of being alone, solitude is the glory of being alone. Both solitude and socialising can be enjoyable when we…
Tori Amos launched her career at the age of 13, performing at Mr Henry’s, a Washington DC gay bar for tips collected in a brandy snifter atop the piano. Her father,…