what critic James Wood in How Fiction Works calls thisness, or “any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability.”

This thisness, this specificity knowable only from personal experience, is what readers pick up on, and what ends up making a story universal and relevant—not catering to... See more

An essay is a personal reflection that links individual experience to socially relevant ideas. You might begin with the particulars of your own life, or, the broader patterns of culture, but eventually you have to bridge the two. An essayist fuses many genres—the pen of a poet, the imagination of novelist, the persuasion of a marketer, the research... See more

These are not novels of plot or event. These are novels as after-action-reports. Incidents from the far reaches of someone else’s memory. Novels as overheard gossip. In summarizing these novels, you feel less like you are relaying the structure of a set of external experiences and more like you are recapping someone’s to-do list. The books are very... See more