“I am sometimes amazed by the depths of my own self-pity.”

“I’ve been collecting these theories of why writers write because so many writers have written about it.”

Elisa Gabbert on Virginia Woolf’s first novel, ‘The Voyage Out.’

On Leonora Carrington’s “The Hearing Trumpet”

On Henri Bergson, disasters, and the human perception of time.

On Henri Bergson, disasters, and the human perception of time.

Classic party fiction is often, if not always, a kind of wealth porn.

On the glory and depravity of hair metal.

On strange, silent children, the trauma of adulthood, and Linda Boström Knausgård’s novella

I had the sense, while I was reading Proust, that I was “reading Proust.” I was having a packaged experience like a tour of the Louvre.

The project of this book club would be to read all the corny stuff from the canon that we really should have read in school but never did.

Classic party fiction is often, if not always, a kind of wealth porn.

When I started reading ‘Frankenstein,’ I was thinking about time. (Well, I am always thinking about time.)

When I heard that a previously unpublished Sylvia Plath short story would appear in January 2019, I requested an electronic galley and then let the file sit unopened in my inbox for several weeks.

There’s a bad double bind in being a writer: If you write about things no one is interested in, nobody is going to read you. But if you write about things other people are interested in, other people are writing about them, too, and maybe better, maybe faster.

  I don’t believe in not believing in guilty pleasures. Guilt is good—it’s part of what keeps me, at least part of the time, from watching YouTube videos when I could be reading. That said, I’m a promiscuous and impatient reader, so one …