Disregarding Henry
A review of a New York mother’s book about raising her son with Down Syndrome
Chronicle of Higher Education
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Loving a Child on the Fringe
A meditation on my daughter with Down Syndrome and a reply to Andrew Solomon’s book about parenting “different” children, Far from the Tree.
Slate
link

Lust Never Sleeps
An examination of the sexual memoir of an English academic
Bookforum
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The End of Life Memoir: Why Thinking about Death Isn’t Morbid At All
On our relationship to death, and Meghan O’Rourke’s book on her mother.
New York Magazine
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Where are Love’s Heroes Today?
Essay-review on erotic life in classical Greece.
Chronicle of Higher Education
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Practice, Practice, Practice.
Review of Masters and Johnson biography.
New York Times
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What’s Wrong with the American Essay
On the domestication of a genre that was born to be wild
Truthdig
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Of Sex and Marriage: Stop it you’re Killing my Libido
On the price of sex: a review of Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity.
Atlantic
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Zip it: Erica Jong’s Stunning Self-Absorption
Essay on the author of Fear of Flying.
The Atlantic
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No Exit
Essay on Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
New York Times
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Good Vibrations
Attack on The Intimate History of the Orgasm
The Nation
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Love Hurts
On the consuming passion of Heloise and Abelard
New York Times
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Shakespeare in Love, or in Context
Essay on Shakespeare and his Scholars.
Atlantic Monthly
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Letter from Paris: Writers in Paradise.
On the wonders and wiles of the French literary scene.
New York Times
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Big Wolfe on Campus
Review of the Irritating Genius of Tom Wolfe
New York Magazine
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Books Make You a Boring Person
Essay on book snobbery
New York Times
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Come Together
Review of September 11 Porn
The Nation
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Domesticated Goddess
Essay on the death and art of Sylvia Plath—and also on her biographers
The Atlantic
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Love in the Time of Hedonism
Is France’s most famous novelist and swinger a cynic, as everyone says?
Harper’s Magazine
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Our Essays, Ourselves: In Defense of the Big Idea
Harper’s Magazine
pdf

Time, Gass, and the Essay
On William Gass, the Overrated
Michigan Quarterly Review
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The Unbearable Slightness: Why Do We Like Milan Kundera, Again?
Reassessing a Literary Rockstar
Harper’s Magazine
pdf

Last the Night: The Abiding Genius of Edna St. Vincent Millay
A Love Letter to a Spurned Love Poet
Harper’s
pdf

In Praise of Student-Teacher Attraction
Review of Blue Angel by Francine Prose
The London Review of Books
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The Higher Yearning: Bringing Eros Back to Academe
Harper’s
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Consuming Passions
On the cheap critique of consumerism, and Alex Shakar’s Savage Girl
Washington Post
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Border Crossings
Review of edgy California novelist’s Susan Straight’s Highwire Noon
Washington Post
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The Impotence of Intelligence
Essay on Failure in The Hothouse by Wolfgang Koeppen (translated from the German)
Los Angeles Times
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Dung, Diet, and Art
On Thinking You’re a Genius: Essay on William Wordsworth
The American Scholar
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The Woman Who Dreamed Too Much
Essay on the life and letters of the extraordinary Margaret Fuller
Los Angeles Times
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Tyrannosaurus Ralph
Essay on Ralph Waldo Emerson: Rehabilitating a Forgotten Giant
Los Angeles Times
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Paris is Boring: Claiming France for the New Homebodies
New Yorker columnist, Adam Gopnik, publishes a book on the French Capital and gets it all wrong.
Harper’s
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Trisomie: Aimer un Enfant a la Marge
Reflections sur ma fille, sur la relativité de nos acquis, et sur un gros livre d’Andrew Solomon
Slate
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Mr. Goodbar Redux
Essay on Modern Dating and its Discontents
The Atlantic Monthly
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The Vindications: The Moral Opportunism of Feminist Biography
Harper’s
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