Merve Emre

Something in the Dark

Djuna Barnes’s short stories return again and again to characters suffering from love, fear, and alienation.

Why Do You Do It This Way?

Episode Eleven of “The Critic and Her Publics”

The Tuning Fork in the Ear

Episode Ten of “The Critic and Her Publics”

The Problem of Other Minds

Episode Nine of “The Critic and Her Publics”

Documents of Mundanity

Episode Eight of “The Critic and Her Publics”

Why Not Memes?

Episode Seven of “The Critic and Her Publics”

Into the Cave

Episode Six of “The Critic and Her Publics”

As Long as You Both Shall Live

Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall explores the various fictions a mother and son must tell themselves and each other when their visions of life diverge.

A Gender Emergency

Episode Five of “The Critic and Her Publics”

The Channeler

Episode Four of “The Critic and Her Publics”

‘I Am the Cabbage Writer’

Episode Three of “The Critic and Her Publics”

What’s Your Type?

Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You and Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood play with the novel’s traditional concern with character types.

‘Wordlessness in Labor’

Episode Two of “The Critic and Her Publics”

I Want a Critic

Episode One of “The Critic and Her Publics”

Making It Big

In Roald Dahl’s stories, cruelty begets cruelty, children grow large, adults grow small, and everyone is trapped in a fun house of dirty, depthless mirrors.

The Illusion of the First Person

A historical survey of the personal essay shows it to be the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.

Educate, Entertain, Scold, Charm

“The critic’s genres foreground her charismatic authority and its expressive markers. Style, for instance—the gradual revelation of a persona or personality.”

The Act of Persuasion

The drama of Elizabeth Hardwick’s life emanated from an elemental restlessness and a desire for sovereignty over her intellect and emotion.

The Meticulous One

Her novels cast a pitiless light on the relationship between patriarchy and fascism.

Pandemic Journal, March 23–29

Brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world, including Michael Greenberg in Brooklyn, Raquel Salas Rivera in San Juan, Aida Alami in Paris, Rahmane Idrissa in Niamey, and more.