Screen Shot 2021-02-02 at 4.36.09 PM.png

How To Tell If You Are In A Henry James Novel

You have a burning longing for someone that, if acted upon, would violate every ideal upon which you’ve meticulously built your fraught existence.

Screen Shot 2021-02-02 at 4.42.37 PM.png

“A Second Life”: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Pleasures of Misogyny

Then the absolute worst thing ever to have happened in fiction happens. Practically-dead-already Esther has to live with and care for the horse-ape who raped her because he’s still her husband. And John & co. just go on and on about how great of her this is.

Screen Shot 2021-02-02 at 4.39.42 PM.png

Edith Wharton Reviews the Starbucks Located at Her Childhood Home on West 23rd Street

Mr. Schultz’s grasping initiation into the New York scene was a large, garish shop in the wasteland beyond Amsterdam Avenue at Eighty-Seventh Street and Broadway in 1994. Since that time, his shops have increasingly begun to migrate downtown, encroaching on “the reservation” where the last good families have already been entirely bought out by University tycoons. It was, perhaps, merely a matter of time before one of these co-engines driving the new New York colonized the modest sandstone townhome on Twenty-Third Street where my parents, George Frederic and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, established themselves and produced three children: Frederic, Henry, and Pussy. (Such was my somewhat unfortunate nickname.)

Previous
Previous

Essays for The Los Angeles Review of Books

Next
Next

Humor at McSweeney's