If you read Sally Rooney, I wish you would read her as I did: bent into the seat of an airplane, flying from the city where I live as a…
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Contemporaries Essays, Reading Sally Rooney
Contemporaries Essays, Reading Sally Rooney
Victoria Falls
Near the end of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, our twenty-one-year-old narrator, Frances, reads George Eliot in a gynecologist’s waiting room: “I sat there tapping my pen against the front…
Contemporaries Essays, Reading Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney’s Couple Form
The publishing industry has for some time now been heavily publicizing a few figures whose success is keeping the whole thing afloat. Sally Rooney is one of those figures. Her…
Contemporaries Essays, Reading Sally Rooney
So-Called Normal People
A dozen or so years ago, when she and I still shared a home, I gave to my oldest stepdaughter what I think both of us would now agree was…
Contemporaries Essays, Reading Sally Rooney
The Sweet Stuff
Straight sex is not a disaster. That’s the plot of Sally Rooney’s novels. This is perhaps hard to take. After all, as Peter Coviello notes, Eve Sedgwick taught us that…
Contemporaries Essays, Reading Sally Rooney
Introduction: Sally Rooney Cluster
Sally Rooney is the harbinger of a literary world yet to come! Or she is evidence of that world in its crumbling decline. It depends who you ask. Upon her…
Contemporaries Essays, Slow Burn: Quarantine Edition
Exodus: Beshalach: Omari, May 27
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Beshalach Exodus 13:17 – 17:16 Portland, OR Dear friends, I have taken to wandering lately. I’ve had to. My apartment is small…
Contemporaries Essays, Slow Burn: Quarantine Edition
Exodus: Bo: Briallen, May 21
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Bo Exodus 10:1 – 13:16 Elmhurst, Queens Dear readers, The locusts are swarming, the darkness is descending, and the Lord is…
1990 at 30, Contemporaries Essays
When M. Mitterrand was a Faggot: Reading Ignorance and Pleasure in Eve Sedgwick’s “Axiomatic”
Wow. I mean, really: wow. I re-read Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet for this collective engagement with core texts from 1990, and was reminded of the vertiginous nature of her…
1990 at 30, Contemporaries Essays
Haircut Theory: Living with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
I recently found myself in a bit of gender trouble when I discovered that Judith Butler and my girlfriend share a hairstylist. That Judith Butler does not cut her own…