Ellen Yang

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on the atlas — 42

highlights — 191

The novel’s prose is bingeable, and it tries oh-so-hard to be literary. But the writing is a wolf in sheep’s clothing — it maintains the illusion of literary merit while masking its exploitation of characters’ trauma and of readers’ sensibilities. Yanagihara clearly handles her prose with care, but little else is given as much attention. She has said in interviews that she “didn’t do any research” and that “Jude came to [her] fully formed.” But Jude is not a fully formed character. He is a vessel for the author’s seemingly masochistic portrayal of unrelenting abuse.
The viral book ‘A Little Life’ handles little with care
Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you've learned, but in the questions you've learned how to ask yourself.
Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's - Bill Watterson
Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards.
Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's - Bill Watterson
Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.
Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's - Bill Watterson
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his poten…
Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's - Bill Watterson
His goal is to reclaim that very sense of privacy his essays give, the ability to be alone with oneself and one’s thoughts, one’s body and its needs. This is not a retreat from politics; for Greif, it’s the beginning of their possibility. Citing Hannah Arendt on the Greeks, he puts it like this: “A hidden sphere, free from scrutiny, provides the foundation for a public person — someone sure enough in his privacy to take the drastic risks of public life, to think, to speak against others’ wills, to choose.” But he knows that we are very far from the conditions of the polis. In the essay on Radi…
What a Piece of Work, by William Deresiewicz
The pathos of Greif’s writing lies in this: that within his mighty prose, as if protected by its bold sophistications, lies a vulnerable, breathing human body, seeking shelter from the technics that beset it. His approach is first of all phenomenological. He starts from where he is, one person alone in a room trying to make sense of what he sees around him, and of what it makes him feel within him:
What a Piece of Work, by William Deresiewicz
Greif is showing us what economic status means, in its rawest and most basic form: the power to spend more money on your children, including on having them in the first place, than other people can on theirs. The essay makes me think of William Burroughs’s gloss on “naked lunch”: it’s the moment when you get to see what’s on the end of everybody’s fork. Liberals are only liberal until it counts, until it hits their kids. The piece is stunningly self-implicating. It finally points its finger not at the bankers or the journalistic hacks, not at Suleman or Jolie, but at the writer himself — which…
What a Piece of Work, by William Deresiewicz
The proffered solutions in that essay, universal basic income and 100% tax on income over a certain level, aren’t entirely offered as solutions to the global perils of capitalism. I don’t think of myself as in any sense simply against capitalism. Capitalism, what is it? What would it mean to live outside it at this stage of developed civilization? Not very much. You must come down to specifics, to practices and institutions. Anyway. I do think of that particular essay as mostly a restatement of Oscar Wilde’s ‘Soul of Man Under Socialism’. Politically, it reaches a part of the thinking of the R…
Living against everything: an interview with Mark Greif
To some degree, it is a less happy name now, as stylisticians have, by and large, moved away from the study of style and towards the study of how meanings and effects are produced by literary texts. There have been a few attempts to change the name of the enterprise: for example to 'literary linguistics' or 'critical linguistics'. But none of the labels so far proposed covers all the aspects of field adequately (for example the two just mentioned can just as easily apply to areas not covered by Stylistics and do not adequately represent the psychological aspects of the approach), and so 'Styli…
Ling 131 - A brief History of Stylistics
The introduction and chapter 2 of J. Douthwaite (2000) Towards a Linguistic Theory of Foregrounding (Edizioni dell'Orso: Turin) has a more detailed history of stylistics and the concept of foregrounding, a concept which is a cornerstone of stylistic analysis.
Ling 131 - A brief History of Stylistics
Stylistics can be seen as a logical extension of moves within literary criticism early in the twentieth century to concentrate on studying texts rather than authors. Nineteenth-century literary criticism concentrated on the author, and in Britain the text-based criticism of the two critics I. A. Richards and William Empson, his pupil, rejected that approach in order to concentrate on the literary texts themselves, and how readers were affected by those texts.
Ling 131 - A brief History of Stylistics
In general terms, stylisticians believe that the 'Claim and Quote' strategy is inadequate in arguing for a particular view of a text, because, like the slip 'twixt cup and lip, there are often logical gaps between the claim and the quotation intended to support it. In other words, stylisticians think that intuition is not enough and that we should analyse the text in detail and take careful account of what we know about how people read when arguing for particular views of texts. But the Stylistics approach in Western Europe and North America clearly grows out of the earlier critical approaches…
Ling 131 - A brief History of Stylistics
an emphasis on the language of the text rather than its author and (ii) an assumption that what criticism needed was accounts of important works of literature based on the intuitional reading outcomes of trained and aesthetically sensitive critics. These critics did not analyse the language of texts very much, but, rather, paid very close attention to the language of the texts when they read them and then described how they understood them and were affected by them.
Ling 131 - A brief History of Stylistics
The moment when two people “win” a language-game is a moment of mutual understanding. Like game, mutual is a word and idea that repeats throughout Intermezzo. Henry James often uses that term to indicate the moment when subjectivity transforms into intersubjectivity, consciousness into shared consciousness—or, as you put it in Intermezzo, when two people’s “thoughts interpenetrate.” Mutuality fascinates me because it’s a form of thought that doesn’t prescribe the content of thought. People can be mutually attracted and mutually contemptuous. Mutual understanding can lead to sex. It can lead to…
The Paris Review - Loving the Limitations of the Novel: A Conversation between Sally Rooney and Merve Emre - The Paris Review
In Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel wrote about how, for many, the world has always been ending. People of every generation have dealt with wars, plagues, and social and economic collapses of all kinds. I promise I am not an agent sent to placate us as we sleepwalk into devastation: I’m simply pointing out that this air of defeatism feels new. (This would be where I point out that social media enables us to ingest human suffering at previously unimaginable scales. It’s easy to pinpoint how the slide into pessimism can coincide with spending hours reading about every atrocity known to …
Economic Crisis: Little Nihilists - by Tell the Bees
Rooney’s stories are happening at a very myopic level: there’s very little beauty, very little transcendence. Everything is mundane. Not realism per se: they’re not exhaustively autobiographical the way Knausgaard’s My Struggle volumes are. More like a devotion to the fictional mundane. Her characters are trapped in a kind of mundane Hell. They’re stereotypes who know they’re stereotypes, who torture themselves and others endlessly, for their inability to express themselves, or to handle their paralyzing self-consciousness. You want to grab their shoulders and shake them and say, “For Gods sak…
Donald Trump and Honor Levy and Sally Rooney and Stephen Sondheim and Me
At one point, Selin tells a friend that she doesn’t really like Dostoyevsky, but maybe she’s more influenced by him than she realizes, in the way she perceives the whole world as a kind of endless comic dialogue of interior and exterior voices. In a sense, she’s a person who always has a psychological novel going on inside her head, and where would the psychological novel be without Dostoyevsky?
Elif Batuman on Writing Fiction vs. Nonfiction | The New Yorker
The Idiot by no means has a happy ending, but it does show that Selin has lived through something meaningful. With refreshing honesty and precision, Batuman depicts how life can be shaped by the pursuit of knowledge and validates the ability of the everyday to be hilariously, inexplicably profound.
The Idiot and the State of Contemporary Fiction – BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW
If, according to Batuman in The Possessed, “[c]ontemporary short stories contain virtually no reference to any interesting work being done in the field over the past twenty, fifty, or hundred years,” then this might explain why The Idiot initially reads somewhat as a hybrid between fiction and memoir—not necessarily because of how much it takes from Batuman’s real life, but because of how much it embraces the existence of art and literature outside of the novel at all.
The Idiot and the State of Contemporary Fiction – BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW
Levin claims that the Cold War brought about a shift in the creative writing world, away from broader societal concerns and toward introspection and navel-gazing. Encouraged to “show, don’t tell,” writers began to prioritize style over substance, fixated on the so-called “beautification of the mundane.” In the worst-case scenario, this results in meticulously written novels that are pleasurable to read, but often lacking in distinct character, plot, or even meaning. Author and critic Brandon Taylor likens the experience to browsing through social media, or an Ikea catalog: “One briefly lives i…
The Idiot and the State of Contemporary Fiction – BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW
In her introduction to The Possessed, Batuman discusses her choice to pursue a PhD rather than accept a fiction writing fellowship. She observes “the puritanical culture of creative writing,” which emphasizes the production of literature as a “craft” instead of an art or science; another aspect of this culture is the understanding that “the academic study of literature…[is] bad for a writer’s formation.” As a result of this, Batuman told Columbia Journal, there seems to exist a “historically recent idea to me that fiction is some space of pure narrative and imagination without a deep connectio…
The Idiot and the State of Contemporary Fiction – BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW
Instead, Selin is an earnest reporter of her circumstances and moods. While this makes for a frustrating reading experience as she waits for Ivan to email back, it also makes for a more empathic one: we, too, are held captive in Selin’s bouts of regret and longing, “dizzy from the sense of intimacy and remoteness.” Yet, this makes sense, knowing that the novel is semi-autobiographical. Batuman reveals as much in her first book The Possessed, a collection of essays which, like its fictional successor, takes its name after one of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s works. In doing so, it becomes inextricably b…
The Idiot and the State of Contemporary Fiction – BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW
Ivan even admits to Selin, “My love for you is for the person writing your letters,” an apt portrayal of how technology can distort relationships. As unreliable and cruel as he is, however—not to mention his girlfriend—Selin can’t resist. Their one-sided affair escalates into a confusion of missed calls, long walks, and Selin’s decision to teach English in Hungary over the summer.
The Idiot and the State of Contemporary Fiction – BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW
It wasn’t so long ago that I was a little girl.” Why does everyone around her seem so much more formed and opinionated? Well, I think it comes down to the problem of the self and the other. When we’re younger, and also sometimes when we’re older, we tend to experience ourselves as eternally in the process of becoming, even as we perceive others—especially older others—as fixed in their identities. Everything we say is provisional, an approximation, a kind of experiment; everything they say is a transparent reflection of their already-formed personality.
Elif Batuman on Writing Fiction vs. Nonfiction | The New Yorker
Oh, boy, if anyone had told me when I was a first-year to do anything because it was “relaxing,” I don’t even know what I would have done. I mean, I guess I would have waited twenty years and then written a biting novel about it. There’s a lot to be said for an American-style liberal-arts education, which prevents young people from professionalizing right away. My parents were educated in the Turkish system and went straight from high school to medical school; my mom, who had skipped a grade, was dissecting corpses at age seventeen. Growing up in America, I think I envied my parents’ education…
Elif Batuman on Writing Fiction vs. Nonfiction | The New Yorker
I think that most of the absurd things the professors say in “” are actually susceptible to a non-absurd reading; it’s just that Selin can’t seem to help zeroing in on the most absurd interpretation. It’s like a gravitational pull. I don’t think she distorts the professors’ words, exactly, but she definitely emphasizes the more bizarre aspects. And I do think there always are bizarre aspects to emphasize. In this way, the portrayal of the professors is both satirical and true to life.
Elif Batuman on Writing Fiction vs. Nonfiction | The New Yorker
The Idiot’s plot, or lack thereof, is a little like going on a walk to nowhere and burying a box of strawberries along the way. It doesn’t have a straightforward meaning—you maybe didn’t have a destination, you might have eaten the strawberries—but it does matter. The Idiot is a novel of becoming, and Selin’s becoming is as a writer. “I thought that was the point of writing stories,” she says early in the book, “to make up a chain of events that would somehow account for a certain mood—for how it came about and for what it led to.”
Long and Pointless and in Love: on Elif Batuman’s The Idiot - Brooklyn Magazine
Here’s one way to describe the plot: It’s 1995 and Selin, a precocious college freshman and burgeoning polyglot, is consumed by her study of language. This is another: It’s 1995 and Selin, a New Jersey-bred daughter of now-divorced Turkish immigrants and aspiring writer, gets her first email account. Here’s a third: It’s 1995 and Selin, more attracted to words than to bodies, becomes infatuated with a senior Hungarian mathematician, Ivan, who corresponds with her in sporadic, dense, and sometimes loopy messages. And a fourth: It’s 1995 and Selin, an American who speaks a few languages but none…
Long and Pointless and in Love: on Elif Batuman’s The Idiot - Brooklyn Magazine
In a 2006 essay in n+1, “Short Story & Novel,” Batuman praises a (fictional) novel, The Miner, “where you go into the mine and nothing happens” as opposed to the (nonfictional) novel, “Germinal, where you go into the mine and come out a socialist.” She condemns writing, especially short stories, that bear “the ghastly imprimatur of the fiction factory”—MFA programs, mainstream magazines, literary journals—work that is “pared down to a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns.” So much short fiction only exists because 10-30 pages is a convenient length for a workshop or for a maga…
Long and Pointless and in Love: on Elif Batuman’s The Idiot - Brooklyn Magazine
She says that if you want to be a writer, or to improve your writing, or to come to know your own mind, fill a notebook a month by writing for 20 minutes or longer on specific topics from “I remember” to “I don’t remember” to your grandmother’s kitchen to your favorite teacher to teeth to…you name it. What follows are Natalie Goldberg’s rules in bold from Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life and with my interpretations: 1. Keep your hand moving. No matter what, don’t stop. Write whatever comes to your mind. Outrace the editor with your writing hand. If you keep your hand moving, the writing wil…
Natalie Goldberg’s “Rules for Writing Practice” | whisper down the write alley
But in this, the most unscientific part of a PhD submission, you also see how the science is done. No matter how impenetrable the thesis title, the project’s success always seems to come down to the same simple thing: other people.
The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements | ANU College of Science
Like, they’re trying to tell you the most important thing they’ve ever said - at the very moment the ship is pulling away from the dock.
The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements | ANU College of Science
10x work is weird and often the opposite of routine. 10x work seems to come up randomly, often hang on a few quick and important decisions, unfold in a few days or weeks, and the results can be huge (or catastrophic). Often there’s no undo button. A deal might fall apart and never recover. A product launch might cause usage to explode, when the right punchline in the launch video is crafted. 100 lines of brilliantly written code might be the difference between state of the art versus rapid obsolescence.
The case against morning yoga, daily routines, and endless meetings
There was a six-month period in 2021 when I was convinced I was a fiction writer. I wanted to write short stories, so I read a lot of them. I’d come across this idea at some point of reading stories the way a carpenter might take apart a chair—disassembling an apparently perfect, whole object in order to figure out its parts, how they were attached, how the object came into being. For short stories, that meant asking: What was the world the story took place in? What details helped me understand it? Who were the characters? How were they introduced to me, and how did they interact with each oth…
falling in love with the short story form
My book is very personal too and before it came out, I was just thinking, “What have I done? What is this impulse in me to self-destruct and say everything?” But I thought of the books that I loved and they did that. That’s the kind of book that I want to read, and now it’s the kind of book I want to publish. I think that’s a good thing to be confronting so that you can have this other identity as a writer.
Ashleah Gonzales Made Kendall Jenner a Literary It-Girl. Now, She's a Published Poet.
GRETA RAINBOW: I have a question I can’t help but ask. Why do you guys think that it is so shocking or captivates the media to see a model reading? GONZALES: I mean, I think mainly because typical models are really just for show. They’re almost like two-dimensional things, so to be multidimensional and both beautiful and have thoughts, I feel like people don’t associate those things together. It’s strange.
Ashleah Gonzales Made Kendall Jenner a Literary It-Girl. Now, She's a Published Poet.
Kendall Jenner reading Miranda July. Kendall Jenner reading Melissa Broder. Kendall Jenner reading Chelsea Hodson—on a yacht, in Miami, wearing an orange bikini that perfectly complements the purple cover of Tonight I’m Someone Else. In the summer of 2019, every other paparazzi shot of the supermodel featured a hot alt-lit title as accessory. The person responsible for her curated stack? Her modeling agent, Ashleah Gonzales. Gonzales had no idea that a birthday tradition with her client and friend would change her own life. But this week, she is releasing Fake Piñata, her first published writi…
Ashleah Gonzales Made Kendall Jenner a Literary It-Girl. Now, She's a Published Poet.
Reading the right books is perhaps the most accessible way to prove all three: intellectualism, taste and aesthetics. Last year, I began to notice literary merch in the wild. A Sally Rooney hat here, Jane Austen tote there and of course . Were lit fic authors a part of the zeitgeist now? They’d passed the T-shirt test afterall. It was like all the middle school Tumblr girls had grown up and discovered a slew of similarly disillusioned fictional characters onto which they could project their woes. Perhaps that’s why all the best sad girl novel heroines are unnamed?
why everyone wants to be the internet's librarian
Intellectualism is society’s hot new commodity. More than ever before, popular culture is placing a premium on being smart as well. The bright young things used to be Hollywood starlets and Victoria’s Secret Angels. These days it’s that twenty-something consumer startup founder and your Forbes 30U30 wunderkids. I’m much more interested in getting tea on Sam Altman’s dating life than Brad Pitt’s. And I promise it’s not just me. Founders are becoming celebrities, and celebrities are becoming founders. At this point, Kim Kardashian is a wildly successful founder that just happens to be insanely h…
why everyone wants to be the internet's librarian
Two pieces of advice I was given that were really helpful is my teacher, Rick Moody, said, “Don’t be afraid to entertain.” And I think sometimes with literary fiction, there’s almost a fear of being dramatic or cliched, but actually, you do have to entertain your reader. So I put that on a post-it note above my desk. You’re competing with television, podcasts, just social media. It’s hard to break through. Are you writing something that really engages and grabs someone and makes them want to read on? Which doesn’t mean that everything has to be like wham, bam, fireworks, but sometimes I would …
Writer Coco Mellors on finding ways to keep going – The Creative Independent
When you’re writing, it’s so easy to tap out when you’re stuck. It’s so easy to reach for your phone. And my teacher, Nathan Englander used to say, “It’s the 27th second that the thought crystallizes or that the image becomes clear. And so you have to wait through one through 26 to get to 27”. Obviously, that’s a symbolic number. But if when you get to 23, you’re stuck and you’re just like, oh, fuck it, and you pick up your phone, you go back down to zero.
Writer Coco Mellors on finding ways to keep going – The Creative Independent
When I write, I turn my phone off, I put it in a drawer in another room, and I keep my wifi off for the most part. And I really, really try, even if I’m desperate to look something up, I’ll make a note of it and I’ll go back to it. And at the hour break, sometimes I’ll turn on my wifi and look at something. But I find that if I turn my wifi on to go research something, I’m on my email before I even notice it. It’s like it’s not conscious, I haven’t meant to, and then I’m just down a rabbit hole. So really, I have to be pretty vigilant about it.
Writer Coco Mellors on finding ways to keep going – The Creative Independent
I’m always trying to work out the balance between earning enough money to live the kind of lifestyle I want, giving myself enough free time to write, giving myself downtime, giving myself time with my partner, who I love. It’s not easy, it’s really hard for all of us. I used to think, “god, I wish I was paid to do the thing I love. I wish either I loved copywriting so much I didn’t want to write fiction, or I write fiction and I got paid to do it.” And one thing I would say, though, is that I actually found that if I have nine things to do in a day, I’ll probably get eight done. If I have one …
Writer Coco Mellors on finding ways to keep going – The Creative Independent
Such a big part of being a writer, I’ve found, is navigating the writing that will make you money and the writing that you love to do. And they are not always the same thing. And we’re all striving for the point in life where they are. But for me and my first book, I didn’t have an agent, I didn’t have a publisher. I wrote it for years, just trying to finish it in order to get those things.
Writer Coco Mellors on finding ways to keep going – The Creative Independent
Fierce independence has always been a cornerstone of America. I’ll be the first to say: I can do it myself, prefer to do it myself. I only know this because I hear echoes of myself in my children. “Don’t help me, Dad, I can do it,” is the refrain. It’s like hearing yourself think. In school, I always dreaded those awful “group projects.” They just seemed rife with drama and inefficiency. However, there have been and will be many more times when going it alone is not an option. Everyone, everywhere, at some point needs someone else. We like to live independently, but the time will come when we …
Look at Me - by Adam Tanous - View from the West
The politics of me is politics based on a distorted Darwinian view of the social contract. It is all about the conquering, the annihilation of the competition. I win, you lose. I’ve harped on this before, but I think evolution—which, in my view, is likely the natural order of things—gets misappropriated by the politics of me. It is worth remembering that evolution drives us toward survival of the species, not the individual.
Look at Me - by Adam Tanous - View from the West
What is ironic about the photo and the situation is that I hadn’t even known my uncle fought in World War II. Though I was very close to him, he had never told a war story, never once referenced it, never bragged, never even showed me this photo. And it wasn’t that he had some awful experience he didn’t want to talk about. It was, rather, the way of his generation. It was all about the good fight, the communal fight, sacrifice for others. There was no “me” in that generation. They just did the good and right thing and didn’t brag about it.
Look at Me - by Adam Tanous - View from the West
Indeed, it seems everyone wants to be an “influencer.” And why not? Shouldn’t we all get paid for doing virtually nothing but living a very bitchin’ life? I suppose the question becomes: If we all become cool influencers, who is left to be influenced?
Look at Me - by Adam Tanous - View from the West
Thompson defined workism as “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose.” In a 2023 Pew poll, 71 percent of Americans said that “having a job or career they enjoy” is extremely or very important for people to live a “fulfilling life.” Only 23 percent said the same thing about being married.
Opinion | Men Are From Mercury, Women Are From Neptune - The New York Times