Merve Emre
Merve Emre is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University. She is the author of “Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America,” “The Ferrante Letters,” and “The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing,” which was the basis for the documentary feature film “Persona.” She is the editor of the books “Once and Future Feminist,” “The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway,” and the Norton Library’s “Mrs. Dalloway.” In 2019, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize, and her work has been supported by the Whiting Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Leverhulme Trust, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, where she was a fellow from 2020 to 2021.
Margaret Cavendish’s “Mad” Imagination
In a time when women were not formally educated, Cavendish became a natural philosopher, an autobiographer, and a fiction writer—and was considered both an eccentric and a genius.
Jon Fosse, the Nobel Prize, and the Art of What Can’t Be Named
In his novels and plays, the Norwegian author has continually probed the limits of the perceptible world.
Why Lydia Davis Loves Misunderstandings
The writer’s painstaking attention to the smallest units of language scales up to momentous questions about how errors of communication shape human relations.
What Is Mom Rage, Actually?
Minna Dubin’s viral essay struck a chord with mothers worldwide, but her follow-up book fails to universalize her experience.
The Afterlives of Susan Taubes
Her suicide, on the publication of her first novel, made her an icon of doomed femininity, but rediscovered works are revealing a more complex writer.
What Susan Sontag Wanted for Women
A new collection reveals a world view haunted by death—and the prospect of liberation.
The Worlds of Italo Calvino
Despite Calvino’s reputation as a postmodernist, his imagination was more in tune with pre-modern literary modes.
A Life Begun Amid the Ruins of a Syrian City
A baby rescued from the earthquake’s rubble was named Aya, meaning “a sign of God’s existence.” But what is the life ahead of her?
Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism?
Literature departments seem to provide a haven for studying books, but they may have painted themselves into a corner.
Jon Fosse’s Search for Peace
The Norwegian author has spent decades producing a strange, revered body of work. But he still doesn’t know where the writing comes from.
The Reclusive Giant of Australian Letters
Gerald Murnane’s new book, billed as his last, surveys the rest of his output.
Cristina Rivera Garza’s Bodies Politic
Scrutinizing gender, history, and authority, the Mexican-born writer has found an unsettling yet playful way to write about desire.
Hito Steyerl’s Digital Visions
Her savage, mischievous works about surveillance, automation, digital platforms, and the art market have made her one of the most revered figures in the mercurial world of contemporary art.
The Seductions of “Ulysses”
Since its publication, a century ago, James Joyce’s epic has acquired a fearsome reputation for difficulty. But its great subject, soppy as it may seem, is love.
Modernism’s Forgotten Mystic
In her short, tumultuous life, Mary Butts produced work admired by Bryher, Marianne Moore, and John Ashbery. Why isn’t she better known?
Diane Williams Will Never Be Dutiful
Williams can write startling things about sex, relationships, and family. But her real project is to test the limits of fiction itself.
Virginia Woolf’s Art of Character-Reading
Woolf believed that characters were a novelist’s greatest tool, a way to bridge life and fiction. In “Mrs. Dalloway,” she put her theory to the test.
Simone de Beauvoir’s Lost Novel of Early Love
Her passion for a doomed friend was so strong that Beauvoir wrote about it again and again.
A Japanese Novelist’s Tale of Bullying and Nietzsche
In Mieko Kawakami’s “Heaven,” everyday dilemmas provide a forum for examining fundamental questions of power and morality.
Margaret Cavendish’s “Mad” Imagination
In a time when women were not formally educated, Cavendish became a natural philosopher, an autobiographer, and a fiction writer—and was considered both an eccentric and a genius.
Jon Fosse, the Nobel Prize, and the Art of What Can’t Be Named
In his novels and plays, the Norwegian author has continually probed the limits of the perceptible world.
Why Lydia Davis Loves Misunderstandings
The writer’s painstaking attention to the smallest units of language scales up to momentous questions about how errors of communication shape human relations.
What Is Mom Rage, Actually?
Minna Dubin’s viral essay struck a chord with mothers worldwide, but her follow-up book fails to universalize her experience.
The Afterlives of Susan Taubes
Her suicide, on the publication of her first novel, made her an icon of doomed femininity, but rediscovered works are revealing a more complex writer.
What Susan Sontag Wanted for Women
A new collection reveals a world view haunted by death—and the prospect of liberation.
The Worlds of Italo Calvino
Despite Calvino’s reputation as a postmodernist, his imagination was more in tune with pre-modern literary modes.
A Life Begun Amid the Ruins of a Syrian City
A baby rescued from the earthquake’s rubble was named Aya, meaning “a sign of God’s existence.” But what is the life ahead of her?
Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism?
Literature departments seem to provide a haven for studying books, but they may have painted themselves into a corner.
Jon Fosse’s Search for Peace
The Norwegian author has spent decades producing a strange, revered body of work. But he still doesn’t know where the writing comes from.
The Reclusive Giant of Australian Letters
Gerald Murnane’s new book, billed as his last, surveys the rest of his output.
Cristina Rivera Garza’s Bodies Politic
Scrutinizing gender, history, and authority, the Mexican-born writer has found an unsettling yet playful way to write about desire.
Hito Steyerl’s Digital Visions
Her savage, mischievous works about surveillance, automation, digital platforms, and the art market have made her one of the most revered figures in the mercurial world of contemporary art.
The Seductions of “Ulysses”
Since its publication, a century ago, James Joyce’s epic has acquired a fearsome reputation for difficulty. But its great subject, soppy as it may seem, is love.
Modernism’s Forgotten Mystic
In her short, tumultuous life, Mary Butts produced work admired by Bryher, Marianne Moore, and John Ashbery. Why isn’t she better known?
Diane Williams Will Never Be Dutiful
Williams can write startling things about sex, relationships, and family. But her real project is to test the limits of fiction itself.
Virginia Woolf’s Art of Character-Reading
Woolf believed that characters were a novelist’s greatest tool, a way to bridge life and fiction. In “Mrs. Dalloway,” she put her theory to the test.
Simone de Beauvoir’s Lost Novel of Early Love
Her passion for a doomed friend was so strong that Beauvoir wrote about it again and again.
A Japanese Novelist’s Tale of Bullying and Nietzsche
In Mieko Kawakami’s “Heaven,” everyday dilemmas provide a forum for examining fundamental questions of power and morality.