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Know that the essays were difficult for their authors to write. You’ll see discussion of their struggles writing the essays in the essays themselves. Maybe this should have been expected…

Johanna Winant

On the day of his suicide, Quentin Compson comes across a little girl in a bakery.1 She silently watches as he buys her bread and buns from a shopkeeper who…

The patient who begins a therapy session by naming the topic they refuse to discuss will wind up talking about that very subject before the fifty minutes is up. This…

I am only hounding myself with these questions, trying to work myself up by the silence that is my only answer from all around. How long, I ask myself, will…

1. The first time I visited Paris, I tried to act it out. Written in 1919 and published the next year by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, Hope Mirrlees’s Paris describes…

You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that. —Samuel Beckett, Endgame for Johanna Winant I. On-earthly delights The painting now known as The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490 – 1510)…

On June 21, 2021, I added a postscript to this essay. — Joshua Kotin I On April Fool’s Day, 1965, Amiri Baraka (known then as LeRoi Jones) sent a postcard…

Of all the interpretive experiences, and of all of the analytical puzzles, that might have baffled me, I had never envisioned this one: attempting, as an English professor, to understand…