Elaine Blair

Quick Words, Long View

Like many of her narrators, Lydia Davis is a taxonomist of daily life.

Hemingway’s Consolations

It’s preposterous to think of Hemingway, with his best sellers and personal celebrity, as a writer’s writer. But is it possible that this might be the best description of his status today?

Janet Malcolm’s Subtle Comedy

Though famed, even feared, as a writer for the gimlet eye she brought to bear on her subjects, she sometimes turned that ironic gaze on herself.

Averted Intimacies

Bette Howland’s work—full of companionable narrators and dry intelligence—is part of a recent wave of reissues that tests the reach of the literary canon.

Designing Women

Making space for women to behave badly in ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ and ‘The Favourite.’

As Bad as It Gets

Making Order of the Breakdown

Elena Ferrante’s ‘The Lying Life of Adults’

Learning to Fight

Ben Lerner’s ‘The Topeka School’

A Woman’s Work

With Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex,’ the modern feminist polemic was born.

Fighting for Her Life

‘Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin’

The Mind–Body Problem

Men’s Lib

John Burnside’s ‘On Henry Miller: Or, How to Be an Anarchist’

Fathers & Daughters

The unnerving comedy of Louis C.K.

On Robert Silvers

Nineteen writers remember The New York Review’s editor.

Looking After the Knausgaards

‘My Struggle: Book Four’

‘The Smallest Possible Disaster’

Jenny Offill’s ‘Dept. of Speculation’

Hilton and Love

Love Objects

In Spike Jonze’s Her, the casting of youth and beauty is an artistic failure that compromises the film’s larger artistic achievement.

The Making of Susan

Single Women and the Sitcom

Like any kind of comedy, a sitcom can have a marriage at its very end, but a marriage somewhere in the middle is narrative disaster. And since sitcoms are, effectively, comedies without end, it’s hard to write a marriage into the show in a way that encourages—rather than dashes—our illusions of its rightness.