Essays

Lauren Oyler, an American literary critic who writes for Harper’s Magazine and the New Yorker, believes her metier is under threat. “I am a professional, and I am in danger,” she declares in My Perfect Opinions, one of eight previously unpublished essays gathered in her first nonfiction book. She wonders if popular digital platforms such as Goodreads, where users can upload book reviews with minimal editorial filtering, will have long-term ramifications for the more considered, rigorous literary criticism that she gets …

Lauren Oyler is an American writer, very tall and very smart (or so I read). In 2021, she published her first novel, Fake Accounts, a plotless story about a young woman not unlike herself who is, as they used to say, very online. But she’s best known, at least in the US, as a critic whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, and whose 5,000-word takedown for the London Review of Books of Trick Mirror, a collection of essays by another thirtysomething American writer, Jia Tolentino, reputedly went viral (I am unable to…

“Exploded essays”, the poet, novelist and memoirist Lavinia Greenlaw calls the 17 pieces of almost-art-critical prose in this bright, mournful book. The phrase suggests a bristling diagram or enlarged view, an annotated arc of thought or feeling. But also something violently botched or ruined – don’t all essays worth the name aspire, more or less secretly, to blowing up their own form? In revisiting a lifetime of looking – at art, landscapes, weather, heavenly bodies, human faces and sometimes nothing at all – Greenlaw…

The tool is meant to help students who might otherwise get overlooked by highlighting qualities within the essay that may make them great candidates for admission, even if the essay itself wasn't perfectly written.These tools have another advantage: They can circumvent the personal bias that an admissions office could hold regarding an applicant's race, gender, or socioeconomic background."There's so much more to a person than what they write in an essay," said Sidney D'Mello, CU Boulder professor and the study…

The American poet Cynthia Zarin was 19 when she first travelled to Venice. The trip was a summer sojourn of sorts with “a boy I thought I might marry”, and the city turned out to be hot and expensive to room in. Zarin and her boyfriend stayed in a grotty boarding house in Padua and took the train to Venice one morning, planning to meet another friend of Zarin’s, who was also making a day trip from Florence. The couple ate veal sandwiches and idled around the steps of the Santa Maria della Salute, but Zarin soon wearied of…

Have you heard the story about crabs in a bucket? When one tries to escape, others claw it down, giving rise to the term “crab mentality”. I find the tale, often proffered with trite self-help nuggets, grating. Not only do we ascribe imagined motivations to crabs, we place them in a situation they would have never encountered without human intervention and then make generalizations about their “mentality”. Narratives that unfold parallelly even as they inform each other. (Little, Brown and Company) Beyond…

Elspeth Barker could write about anything and have you longing for more, which makes it sad that she wrote so little: we need to cherish every word that has survived of her. She was the wife of the poet George Barker and, in the ways that count, a poet herself – although in prose. When she died, in 2022, she had published one wonderful novel, O Caledonia, about a wayward 16-year-old girl growing up in a Scottish castle. Described by Ali Smith as “one of the best least-known novels of the 20th century”, it became, once…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Can you tell if what you're reading right now was written by a human or generated by artificial intelligence? Do you care? Those are essentially the questions that University of California San Diego researchers asked in an experiment with ChatGPT at a regional high school. The researchers tested…

In her introduction to this pocket-sized new collection of journalism by the American writer Susan Sontag, the academic Merve Emre begins with a reassurance to (younger, I assume) readers that there’s nothing to be afraid of here. “A certain anxiety besieges the critic asked to introduce a volume of earlier writings on women, lest she should find the ideas expressed in them interesting only as relics of a distant, less enlightened past,” she declares, eyeing the smelling salts she presumably keeps about her desk for times…

Did Susan Sontag like women? I’m not so sure she did, which made the arrival of feminism in the early 1970s a complicated prospect. Should she get on board or scuttle the ship? I’m not talking about the private realm, of course. She liked, loved, lusted after and admired plenty of individual women. Although she declined to identify publicly as a lesbian, most of her sexual relationships were with women. But was membership of the second sex useful to the public project of Being Sontag? Judging from the evidence here, it…