Cosmopolitan Readers
The idea is that a novelist who is ambitious enough to want a global audience, and who does not want to be imprisoned by his or her own language,… More
On Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
The problem of Emma is the problem of desire. Her only métier is desire, and its top percent, love. Emma lusts for gratification through commodity and body and makes… More
Mausoleum of Lovers
One by one I began to rip off in chips the made-up skin of the little mannequin, and this gives him leprosy by leaving the exposed white wax on… More
On Translating Hervé Guibert
Le mausolée des amants makes every essential demand upon me; the sensual exigencies, and cruel untempered forms of address in this epistolary work...mark the rest of us as gilt… More
On Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”
I saw, for the first time, what it really means to be a poet—to have the habit of mind where the universe reveals itself through linguistic forms the way,… More
On D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover
What scandalized (and scandalizes) conservative forces and even many of Lawrence’s colleagues in the literary world was not only Connie’s adultery, but the author’s failure to condemn the same... More
On Judy Blume’s Forever
I checked out Forever from my local library, where it sat serenely in Teen Fiction for all the world to see. I read it on a gray morning, and… More
On J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series
These books have taught children to read, to think, to write, and to criticize, all hallmarks of free expression. (Harry Potter taught me how to read Portuguese. Quidditch is… More
On Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago
Even under Stalin’s successor Khrushchev there was still no realistic hope of publishing the entire book. So in 1957 Pasternak finally allowed a manuscript (including the poems, published as… More
On Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
I live in a world that resounds with stories of young girls being raped, experiencing first love, where court systems rule against poor blacks and further commit violence against… More
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