[{"id":276183,"date":"2026-09-08T05:52:46","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T09:52:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276183"},"modified":"2026-09-05T21:53:37","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T01:53:37","slug":"emma-cline-r-f-kuang-alice-hoffman-and-more-20-new-books-out-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/emma-cline-r-f-kuang-alice-hoffman-and-more-20-new-books-out-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Emma Cline, R.F. Kuang, Alice Hoffman, and more: 20 new books out today!"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a rule in September that every week must include one epically splashy book: this week, Emma Cline’s Switzy<\/em> is here to fulfill that quota. It’s time for us all to get our hands on the novelist’s buzzy new release, as well as many others, including R. F. Kuang’s Taipei Story<\/em>, a brand new Alice Hoffman book, as well as many nonfiction titles for those in need. Read on for the full list, and happy Tuesday.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"Emma<\/p>\n

Emma Cline, Switzy<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Random House)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“This truly profound journey will stay with readers long after the last page is turned.\u201d
\n\u2013Booklist<\/em><\/p>\n

\"R.<\/p>\n

R.F. Kuang, Taipei Story<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(William Morrow)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A visceral exploration of language as a bridge and a barrier.”
\n\u2013Kirkus<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Alice<\/p>\n

Alice Hoffman, The Witches of Cambridge<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Scribner)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Rich with history, heartbreak, and magic, Hoffman’s tale of privilege and persecution expertly navigates past and present, reality and fantasy, all of it rendered in brilliant detail.”
\n\u2013<\/em>Leigh Bardugo<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Brian Dillon, Ambivalence<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(NYRB)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Brian Dillon is always invigoratingly brilliant. His sentences, his stylistic innovations, the range and potency of his intellectual adventures; he is a true master of the literary arts and a writer I would never hesitate to read.”
\n\u2013<\/em>Max Porter<\/p>\n

\"Megan<\/p>\n

Megan Giddings, Black Arts: Stories<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Amistad)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“The author deserves high marks for this ebullient, ideas-driven collection.”
\n\u2013Publishers Weekly<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Francis<\/p>\n

Francis Fukuyama, In the Realm of the Last Man<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(FSG)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Fukuyama offers shrewd, provocative analysis of politics, society, and intellectual currents in tart and lively prose.”
\n\u2013Publishers Weekly<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Ariel Lawhon, The Pirate Queen<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Doubleday)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A heroic, exciting, and stormy voyage.\u201d
\n\u2013Kirkus<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Girlhood<\/p>\n

Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell, Girlhood, Translated: Understanding Young Women in the Age of Therapy Speak and Self-Diagnosis<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Crown)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Both a brilliant decoding of therapy speak and a compassionate reckoning with what gets lost when the language of mental illness becomes the only language young people have for their inner lives.”
\n\u2013<\/em>Rachel Aviv<\/p>\n

\"Jill<\/p>\n

Jill Bialosky, Mock Heart: New and Selected Poems<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Knopf)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cTo read Jill Bialosky\u2019s\u00a0Mock Heart: New & Selected Poems\u00a0<\/i>is to explore the lyric opulence of a life lived at the nexus of beauty and its blood sister, loss.”
\n\u2013<\/em>Diane Seuss<\/p>\n

\"William<\/p>\n

William D. Cohan, Money to Burn: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Portfolio)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A master class in reporting from the hidden power centers of America\u2019s billionaire class.”
\n\u2013<\/em>Susan Glasser<\/p>\n

\"Jordan<\/p>\n

Jordan Tannahill, The Living Realm<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(FSG)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A\u00a0perfectly rendered story of friendship, love, and the porous border between the living and the dead.”
\n\u2013Publishers Weekly<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Frenchman<\/p>\n

Jon Else, Frenchman Flat: The Rise and Fall of Atomic Bombs<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Harvard University Press)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“An important account of nuclear hubris and its incompletely tallied costs.”
\n\u2013Kirkus<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Priya<\/p>\n

Priya Parker, The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Riverhead)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“This is a life-giving book, and Priya is the luminous and ingenious teacher we need.\u201d
\n\u2013<\/em>Krista Tippett<\/p>\n

\"Ken<\/p>\n

Ken Liu, The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Saga Press)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Thought-provoking, heartbreaking, and wonderous are some of the many ways the tales in this collection will engage readers.”
\n\u2013<\/em>From the publisher<\/p>\n

\"James<\/p>\n

James Muldoon, Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Our Relationships<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Faber & Faber)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“In his urgent, humane book, sociologist James Muldoon urges us to pay more attention to our deepening emotional entanglements with AI, and how profit-hungry tech companies might exploit them.”
\n\u2013The Guardian<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Ashley<\/p>\n

Ashley Woo, Wildwood<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Harper Perennial)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“An atmospheric fall debut.\u201d
\n\u2013Booklist<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Saul<\/p>\n

Saul Williams, Songs My Mother Taught Me: Why the Artist Must Take Sides<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Haymarket Books)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Exquisite and essential reading for the revolution from one of our greatest minds.”
\n\u2013<\/em>Warsan Shire<\/p>\n

\"Carolyn<\/p>\n

Carolyn Forch\u00e9, Otherwhere: New and Selected Poems<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Scribner)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“This is an essential and mighty book of courageous attention, exacting artistry, and redeeming radiance.”
\n\u2013Booklist<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Love<\/p>\n

Yukiko Motoya, trans. by Kamil Spychalski, Love at Least<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Soft Skull)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Motoya balances a raw, unfiltered examination of a woman pixilated by mental illness with an anti-love story that unsettles and lingers.”
\n\u2013Booklist<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a rule in September that every week must include one epically splashy book: this week, Emma Cline’s Switzy is here to fulfill that quota. It’s time for us all to get our hands on the novelist’s buzzy new release,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5494,"featured_media":276330,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,43070,43135,43646],"tags":[9940,23391,112075,1256,55028,112083,112068,17343,31412,13738,32233,112078,21135,112069,97001,5484,24650,112076,10319,112087,112082,54760,112073,112074,112085,112079,87379,56528,112084,112071,112065,112066,112080,112077,112081,112070,112067,112086,112072,61783,26047,39896],"class_list":["post-276183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","category-the-hub","tag-alice-hoffman","tag-ambivalence","tag-and-the-rise-of-a-new-wall-street","tag-apollo","tag-ariel-lawhon","tag-ashley-woo","tag-black-arts-stories","tag-brian-dillon","tag-carolyn-forche","tag-emma-cline","tag-francis-fukuyama","tag-frenchman-flat-the-rise-and-fall-of-atomic-bombs","tag-girlhood","tag-in-the-realm-of-the-last-man","tag-james-muldoon","tag-jill-bialosky","tag-jon-else","tag-jordan-tannahill","tag-ken-liu","tag-love-at-least","tag-love-machines-how-artificial-intelligence-is-transforming-our-relationships","tag-megan-giddings","tag-mock-heart-new-and-selected-poems","tag-money-to-burn-the-unvarnished-truth-about-leon-black","tag-otherwhere-new-and-selected-poems","tag-priya-parker","tag-r-f-kuang","tag-saul-williams","tag-songs-my-mother-taught-me-why-the-artist-must-take-sides","tag-suzanne-garfinkle-crowell","tag-switzy","tag-taipei-story","tag-the-art-of-fighting-the-transformative-power-of-conflict","tag-the-living-realm","tag-the-passing-of-the-dragon-and-other-stories","tag-the-pirate-queen","tag-the-witches-of-cambridge","tag-trans-by-kamil-spychalski","tag-translated-understanding-young-women-in-the-age-of-therapy-speak-and-self-diagnosis","tag-wildwood","tag-william-d-cohan","tag-yukiko-motoya"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Qz","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-27-at-2.34.15-PM.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5494"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276397,"date":"2026-09-08T05:10:25","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T09:10:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276397"},"modified":"2026-09-03T22:01:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T02:01:09","slug":"emily-wilson-talks-complicated-men-celebrating-strangeness-and-why-there-is-always-another-way-to-say-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/emily-wilson-talks-complicated-men-celebrating-strangeness-and-why-there-is-always-another-way-to-say-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily Wilson Talks Complicated Men, Celebrating Strangeness, and Why There is Always Another Way to Say It"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most celebrated classicists writing today, Emily Wilson achieved a rare kind of literary stardom in 2017, when her translation of Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/i> made her the first woman to publish a complete English version of the epic. Her work, which spans Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca as well as Homer, is known for its rigorous commitment to traditional meter and its startling clarity.<\/p>\n

Increasingly a public figure as well as a scholar, Wilson found herself at the center of the cultural conversation again this year when Christopher Nolan cited her famous opening line as an important influence on his own conception of Odysseus, only for Wilson later to publish a sharply critical review of the finished film.<\/p>\n

Like a lot of people, I was greatly looking forward to reading her new essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature<\/i><\/a>, which will be out in the US this September from Liveright. As a translator myself, I was especially eager to talk with her about the choices that make translation such an endlessly provisional art: what to preserve, what must inevitably be lost, and how to make an ancient world intelligible without losing the strangeness of it.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Leanne Ogasawara<\/strong>: \u201cTell me about a complicated man\u201d may be the most debated single line of translation in recent memory\u2014one reader even joked that it sounded more like a relationship status on Facebook. In your book you explain that polytropos can convey versatility, cunning, wandering, and the experience of being turned about by circumstance. How did you finally land on \u201ccomplicated\u201d and did the intensity of the reactions surprise you?<\/p>\n

Emily Wilson<\/strong>: I write about that choice at some length in Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea<\/i>, so I will try not to replicate all that here. I\u2019ll just say for now that I arrived at that choice after many days of consideration and experimentation, and now, almost ten years later, I still don\u2019t think I can improve on it, given the particular goals of my translation of the original poem. I aimed to echo the traditional, metrical poetics of the original, and its status as a text designed for oral performance\u2014unlike most modern translators in English, who have used prose or free verse. So I needed a word that could scan, when followed by the stressed syllable of \u201cman.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s good that so many people feel empowered to engage with a discussion about the high stakes and complexities of translation, no matter what their background, their knowledge, or their feelings may be.<\/p>\n

I also aimed, unlike most translators, to recreate the rapid pacing of the original, so I didn\u2019t want to translate one four-syllable word by a long multi-word phrase; doing so has certain obvious advantages in terms of echoing the ambivalence of this single word, but also obvious disadvantages in terms of slowing down the whole narrative right at the start. Like every translation choice, \u201ccomplicated\u201d is a compromise. It isn\u2019t identical in denotation, connotation, register or sound to the original\u2014and nor are any of the other ways translators have dealt with polytropos<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I think of it as being like democracy: the worst option, except for all the others.It\u2019s not surprising that there was and remains so much fixation on the fifth word of the first line, in a poem that is over twelve thousand lines long. Sticking to one word in the first line saves a great deal of time. It\u2019s good that so many people feel empowered to engage with a discussion about the high stakes and complexities of translation, no matter what their background, their knowledge, or their feelings may be.<\/p>\n

LO<\/strong>: When your translation was first published in 2017, it was described everywhere as the first English Odyssey by a woman\u2014the Guardian<\/em>, the New York Times<\/em>, and the Washington Post<\/em> all ran \u201cfirst woman\u201d headlines. I was puzzled at the time by how heavily that framing dominated, especially since we saw nothing like it when Edith Grossman\u2019s translation of Don Quixote appeared.\u00a0 It also made me think about how thoroughly men have dominated translation from ancient Greek and Latin, despite how many women take PhDs in the field. The contrast with classical Japanese translation is striking: women are well represented, with the notable exception of The Tale of Genji<\/em>, whose English translators have all been white men. Why do you think the translator\u2019s gender became the story in the case of Homer specifically? And has that conversation broadened into a discussion of who gets to translate canonical texts more generally\u2014questions of race, class, and access as well as gender?<\/p>\n

EW<\/strong>: I shared your surprise about those headlines and that framing. When I took on the project of re-translating the Odyssey<\/i>, I hadn\u2019t even known or considered that I might be the first non-man to publish a complete English version. I had taught several different English translations over the years, and had never even noticed that they were all by men. I don\u2019t think my actual work as a translator\u2014either of Homer, or of Seneca, Sophocles or Euripides\u2014has anything to do with my gender as such. My goals were about poetic form, pacing, and narrative perspective. And yet the labelling of me as \u201cthe woman translator\u201d or \u201cthe feminist translator\u201d persists even unto this day. It\u2019s become my standard traditional epithet, rather as ships in Homer are always \u201cswift\u201d and \u201csea-faring,\u201d even when they\u2019ve been immobilized on a beach for ten years. Epithets are sticky things.<\/p>\n

Over the past ten years, I\u2019ve been very moved by how many people, especially young people, have told me they see me as some kind of inspiration. I feel very touched and honored by that, and I recognize that it\u2019s a great responsibility.<\/p>\n

But you\u2019re right also that there is indeed a weird gendered imbalance, in that published English translations of major, long canonical works by Greek and Roman authors into English have tended to be by men, even though that\u2019s not the case in other languages (there are plenty of French and Italian translations of Homer by women), and even though there are plenty of English-speaking classicists who are not men. I think it\u2019s about a cluster of partly separate issues, which include language training (for living languages, there is a far wider pool of competent potential translators, whereas for those that are no longer spoken, competence has to be acquired in the academy for English-speakers, whereas in France or Italy, it can be acquired in the liceo<\/i> or lyc\u00e9e<\/i>); there is also the marginalization of translation in the Anglophone academy (it\u2019s not going to get you tenure or promotion, so there\u2019s less motivation to take on a major, time-consuming translation project).<\/p>\n

But these issues don\u2019t fully explain why so many twentieth and twenty-first century English-language translations of major Greek and Roman works have been published by retired male academics, rather than elderly women. Perhaps it is partly about networks; I personally took on all my translation projects only because I was approached with the idea by specific editors; perhaps there are gaps in terms of whom editors or publishers think of as potential translators. But this is all pure speculation; I really don\u2019t know!<\/p>\n

Over the past ten years, I\u2019ve been very moved by how many people, especially young people, have told me they see me as some kind of inspiration. I feel very touched and honored by that, and I recognize that it\u2019s a great responsibility.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d definitely like to see a wider conversation about who translates the canon and how that might matter (as well as how it might not). Classicist Jackie Murray has written eloquently about the need for more BIPOC translators of Greek and Latin classics.<\/p>\n

In terms of the media coverage: I think that\u2019s a somewhat separate question. One reason for the persistent headlines, I would argue, is that it\u2019s quite similar to the fixation on \u201ccomplicated\u201d: it\u2019s difficult to come up with a new story, and people, including journalists, tend to congregate in packs. After the New York Times <\/i>had covered my work with the framing that, \u201cWilson is a woman and she used the word \u2018complicated,\u2019\u201d there were then dozens more pieces saying exactly those same two things.<\/p>\n

To me, this was not a particularly good framing, in that it entirely ignores my actual interpretative and poetic goals and work in favor of a factoid about the field, and in that the fixation on me as if I\u2019d cracked a glass ceiling sidelines the work of a multitude of other female classicists, Homerists and translators who are also not men. But of course, I can see the appeal of a quick nugget for a headline writer, and I am very glad that there was such wide coverage of translation and of Homer in the popular press. The coverage, whatever its content, has succeeded in prompting at least a notch more popular awareness of the interpretative stakes of translation, and I\u2019m grateful for that, regardless of what anybody thinks or says about me personally.<\/p>\n

As for why it was different with Edith Grossman\u2019s brilliant Don Quixote<\/i>: this might have something to do with particular assumptions and perceptions of Homer in particular, and perhaps partly about Greek and Roman literature more broadly. Quixote himself is a comically ineffectual, bumbling hero; he\u2019s nobody\u2019s notion of idealized masculinity.<\/p>\n

Moreover, Spanish is not imagined by most English-speakers as a language that belongs particularly to men. Things are different in the case of Homeric poems, especially in how they\u2019re configured in American popular culture, with perceptions of these epics as foundational both for \u201cwestern culture\u201d (although they originate in the eastern area of the archaic Greek world), and as authorizing or modelling a particular modern set of ideas about idealized, heroic masculinity. Much of the public reaction to my work is, I would say, less about my actual work than about the tenacity of these dubious and non-historical ideas.<\/p>\n

A major theme in Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea<\/i> is that particular interpretations of ancient literature or culture can be very sticky, regardless of their truth value. For instance, I discuss a version of this phenomenon within antiquity, in my analysis of the brilliant ancient orator, Demosthenes\u2014whose presentation of classical Athens as the glorious home of liberty and resistance to imperial oppression has been extraordinarily influential in later periods, regardless of its historicity. Another way this plays out in the book is in my analysis of how re-translators often echo or follow one another, rather than looking afresh at the interpretative possibilities of the originals.<\/p>\n

LO<\/strong>: Is there something inherently adversarial about retranslation? After all, deciding a book needs translating again implies that the previous versions no longer do everything you want them to do. Haruki Murakami, in an essay he wrote about translating The Great Gatsby<\/i>, argued that translations have expiration dates. The original may endure, but translations age along with the language and assumptions of the culture that produced them. I wondered what you make of that?<\/p>\n

EW<\/strong>: Arthur Sze\u2019s latest book, Transient Worlds<\/i>, makes a similar point: that the great works of antiquity, whether in classical Chinese or ancient Greek and Latin, may endure, while their translations are transient and need to be replaced with each new generation of readers.<\/p>\n

As for the great question about whether re-translation is necessarily adversarial: I would not say so, because it is not a zero-sum game. <\/p>\n

I think this is true, up to a point. One of the major themes of Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea <\/i>is that as our own culture changes, we see new and different things in ancient literature and ancient cultures\u2014and these new vantage points enable or necessitate asking new questions about the past, reinterpreting and re-translating in light of new insights, priorities and norms.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s also true that translations can sometimes become canonical works in their own right, as is the case for the Latin Vulgate and the King James Version of the Bible, or the Pope translation of the Iliad<\/i>\u2014which isn\u2019t usable for teaching American undergraduates about Homer in the twenty-first century, but is foundational if you want to understand the history of British poetry in the eighteenth century (and is also a fabulous read in itself).<\/p>\n

The path of true literary history never did run smooth. A core theme in Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea <\/i>is that canons shift, and all such worlds are transient things. I often think about Keats\u2019s great sonnet, \u201cOn First Looking into Chapman\u2019s Homer,\u201d not just because it\u2019s a wonderful reminder of how revelatory and important a translation can be, for someone without access to the original, but also because it\u2019s a reminder that the newest isn\u2019t always the best for every reader. Keats had read more recent translations, including Pope; but it was Chapman\u2019s seventeenth century translation that made Homer alive to him, because it had stylistic features that foreshadowed what you might call being \u201cKeatsian,\u201d in its focus on synaesthetic experience.<\/p>\n

As for the great question about whether re-translation is necessarily adversarial: I would not say so, because it is not a zero-sum game. Pope didn\u2019t replace Chapman; both are still available to be read. When I published new translations of Homer, I didn\u2019t burn all copies of the work of my predecessors! The Apple of Discord\u2014thrown amid the wedding feast by Eris, goddess of Conflict\u2014causes bitter in-fighting among the goddesses, and a deadly war for mortals, because it is inscribed with a singular dedication: \u201cFor the most beautiful,\u201d or, \u201cFor the finest.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Greek word makes it clear that there is only one \u201cfinest\u201d dedicatee. There\u2019s no chance of dividing the Apple, and only one goddess can win the prize\u2014so Hera and Athena are furious that Aphrodite is given this glory, and the Trojan War ensues.<\/p>\n

In Homer, the same kind of dilemma plays out on the human plane, in the conflict over which singular man can be the \u201cbest of the Achaeans,\u201d the \u201cbest of the Greeks,\u201d or the singular lord of rocky Ithaca. But the Homeric poems also remind us that in some spheres\u2014like the banquet or the council meeting or in athletic competitions\u2014honor and benefits can be shared among a group, and difference need not be deadly. To me, re-translation is more like a banquet than a deadly battle: I\u2019m not slaying my esteemed predecessors to establish my own glory. Instead, I provide a different cut of meat for everyone to enjoy at the feast.<\/p>\n

My commitment to poetic form is one of my most important priorities as a translator of metrical poetry.<\/p>\n

At the same time, any re-translator does have a responsibility to bring a new dish, not just reheat the same old stuff. Another theme of my discussion of translation in CWDS <\/i>is that there can be a temptation for translators to echo the approach and even the phrasing of their predecessors\u2014even when it\u2019s not the only option. I find this a bit disappointing, because it means that readers without access to the original have a more limited vision of its possibilities than they could otherwise have. \u201cMake it new\u201d is a good mantra for all writers, and that includes re-translators.<\/p>\n

Any new work of re-interpretation needs to justify its own existence. This is true of new works of history or literary criticism, and it\u2019s also true of re-translation. If I publish a new book about Sophocles, I need to explain clearly how it\u2019s different from the numerous existing books on the same subject. Similarly, if I publish a re-translation, I need to offer something that is genuinely, deeply, responsibly engaged with the original, while offering a significantly different vision of it, compared to existing English translations. If I can\u2019t do that, the whole project is a waste of everyone\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

LO<\/strong>: I really appreciated the twenty principles for translating ancient texts in your afterword. My favorite is your insistence that translators reproduce not only information but effect: “If the original makes you laugh, cry, feel excited, get goosebumps, feel puzzled, get bored, be charmed, then the translation should try to create those effects.” What effects of Homer did you feel were underplayed or missing in earlier English translations? And what did you most want to restore?<\/p>\n

EW<\/strong>: I wouldn\u2019t have re-translated Homer at all, unless I\u2019d felt there were important elements of the original poems that were under-played or ignored in existing modern translations. The primary elements I wanted to replicate were: the use of traditional, musical meter, rather than the prose or free verse used by most modern English translators; the multiplicity of perspective (rather than flattening out the different voices); the rapidity of the narrative, which makes the original feel much more exciting than the more verbose translations; and the emotional and descriptive vividness, which ancient critics called enargeia<\/i>.<\/p>\n

These goals are in tune with two major themes of Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea<\/i>. These are the importance of poetic form in verse translation\u2014whether of drama, lyric poetry or epic\u2014and the need for literary translators to consider the stylistic and emotional effects of both the original and the translation. For instance, in my extensive discussion of the challenges of translating ancient Greek and Roman comic genres, I consider whether translators of these texts need to try to make the reader or audience laugh\u2014even when the jokes hinge on social assumptions and values that are quite alien to many modern readers.<\/p>\n

LO<\/strong>: I had not realized until reading your essay on translating Homer that you rendered the entire poem in iambic pentameter\u2014and that your translation has one English line for every line of the Greek. That is an astonishing formal commitment. What did keeping both the meter and the line count force you to sacrifice\u2014and what did it make possible? Do you have different formal priorities when tackling other ancient poets or writers?<\/p>\n

EW<\/strong>: My commitment to poetic form is one of my most important priorities as a translator of metrical poetry. It is perhaps my most fundamental commitment. In terms of my training, I\u2019m somewhat distinctive among contemporary classicists in having a degree in early modern English literature as well as degrees in classics, and in taking an obsessive interest in the long histories of classical reception and in poetic form, in English as well as ancient languages. Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea<\/i> pulls together my interests in the long historical sweep of classical receptions and in poetic form.<\/p>\n

Predictably, my focus on traditional meter has not been central in the public discourse about my work; \u201cScholar publishes traditional metrical translation of ancient poem\u201d is, I\u2019ll admit it, less catchy than \u201cFirst Woman!\u201d or \u201cModern Translation!\u201d But the \u201cmodern\u201d framing strikes me as extremely misleading, just as much so as the \u201cwoman\u201d framing, insofar as my approach is mostly not modern at all: I want to convey the alien strangeness of the original texts, and in my Homeric translations, I aim to convey the plainness, rapidity and nobility of the originals, the qualities emphasized by the Victorian critic and poet, Matthew Arnold, in contrast to the verbosity and lack of rhythm in the translations of most of my contemporaries.<\/p>\n

The decision to confine myself to the same number of lines as the original Odyssey<\/i> had some huge pay-offs, in terms of forcing me to think constantly about pacing. Luckily, for the possibilities of this approach, English has a huge vocabulary, and Homeric Greek makes great use of little particles that don\u2019t necessarily have to be translated as such in English, as long as the sense and emphasis of the sentence is conveyed; most translators, not just me, often omit direct translations for many of the little particles that suggest \u201cindeed\u201d or \u201cat least\u201d or \u201cthen\u201d or \u201con the one hand\u201d or \u201cin contrast to the previous thing said\u201d (like au <\/i>or d\u0113 <\/i>or ara <\/i>or men<\/i>).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s more natural in English to convey many of these points of emphasis by word order rather than particles. As an example of what I mean, here\u2019s a random (but great!) line of the Iliad<\/i> (9.309): chr\u0113 men d\u0113 ton muthon ap\u0113lege\u014ds apoeipein. <\/i>The Loeb prose translation\u2014whose creators don\u2019t subject themselves to any poetic or sonic constraints\u2014doesn\u2019t translate the particles, \u201cmen d\u0113<\/i>\u201d (\u201cand on the one hand indeed\u201d): the translation reads, \u201cI must speak my words outright.\u201d This is quite typical of Homeric poetics.<\/p>\n

And yet, sticking to the original line count, combined with extremely regular meter, was indeed a tight constraint. Odysseus might be polymechanos <\/i>in the original, and he\u2019d have to be \u201ccrafty\u201d or \u201csmart\u201d in the translation; I couldn\u2019t afford a five-syllable translation of every five-syllable word, and I wanted a little more flexibility in terms of word choice and sentence structure. With my translation of the Iliad<\/i>, I gave up on the line-for-line constraint, while continuing to use traditional meter (iambic pentameter). I aimed there to use a similar number of words, to roughly echo the pacing of the original, but not to limit myself to the line count. I ended up feeling that in many ways, I preferred that approach. For that reason, I\u2019m now partway through a complete re-re-translation of the Odyssey<\/i>, using a similar approach. With this new version\u2014which may, perhaps, be the second published English translation by a woman, ha ha\u2014I am still using very regular traditional iambic pentameter, but I\u2019m using more lines than the original, as in my version of the Iliad.<\/i><\/p>\n

With other verse translation projects, such as my versions of Seneca, Sophocles and Euripides, I\u2019ve played around with poetic form, for instance using different rhythms in tragedy when the original meters change. With ancient verse drama, the line breaks are often extremely important: for instance, in scenes where there is stichomythia<\/i>\u2014where each character in a debate or fraught conversation delivers only one metrical line, then capped by the other character\u2014it seemed to me essential both to use meter, and to keep the specific line breaks. Another ongoing translation project of mine is of Ovid\u2019s Heroides<\/i>, which is composed in elegiac couplets, and which makes extensive and repeated use of witty turns or punch-lines at the end of the couplets; with this particular project, it seems to me essential both to convey Ovid\u2019s technical poetic mastery, the precarious balance between sorrow and comedy, and also to land the line-breaks in the right places.<\/p>\n

As I show repeatedly in Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, <\/i>there is no one single way to approach the technical and stylistic challenges of creating an equivalent to a literary text, using none of the same words. Every translation project brings its own joys and challenges. It\u2019s so fun, and such a privilege to get to play with this kind of task every day.<\/p>\n

LO<\/strong>: In your introduction, you quote Susan Sontag on translation as an ethical encounter with people different from ourselves. And throughout the book, you return to the importance of preserving the strangeness of ancient literature rather than smoothing it away for modern readers. What struck me is that your Homer is not strange because the English is archaic or difficult, but the strangeness lies instead in the Homeric world itself\u2014its assumptions, values, and images. Can you talk a bit about how you worked to preserve the strangeness in translation?<\/p>\n

EW<\/strong>: Great question! I think any literary translator needs to think hard about how to work with and push back against readers\u2019 likely horizons of expectations. As a comparandum, I have really enjoyed the translations of Korean fiction by Anton Hur, and also appreciated Hur\u2019s critical comments about how he aims to challenge both rigid notions of who \u201cthe reader\u201d is and what \u201che\u201d wants, and expectations about the style and genres of contemporary Korean or Asian fiction\u2014which includes diverse voices, diverse genres, comedy, fantasy, and queerness, and doesn\u2019t always cater to the \u201cmythical white male English reader.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is no linear progression of \u201cenlightenment\u201d from antiquity to the present day.<\/p>\n

In the case of ancient Greek and Roman literature, popular and even scholarly expectations about how these texts \u201cshould\u201d sound in English are quite different from the expectations many readers may have about how contemporary fiction \u201cshould\u201d sound. There\u2019s a presupposition, reinforced by specific traditions of translation over the past century, that these poems will and should sound stilted, awkward, verbose, and almost unreadable\u2014even if the originals are fluent and beautiful!\u2014or that the only way to appeal to the mythical \u201cmodern English reader\u201d is to add in numerous modern clich\u00e9s and use an excitable style, full of exclamation points and ellipses. My goal with Homer was to relocate the strangeness of these poems, so that it\u2019s not about weird word order, but about the magical strangeness of the poems\u2019 imagined worlds and metaphors, as well as about the experience, likely strange to many modern readers, of inhabiting metrical, traditional poetry for many hours on end.<\/p>\n

Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea <\/i>aims to underline the strangeness of numerous ancient genres and cultural assumptions, beyond Homeric epic. I discuss, for instance, the alien forms of archaic Greek lyric, designed to be literally sung with the accompaniment of a lyre\u2014a cultural form that is very difficult to replicate or recreate, using the norms of contemporary poetics and a printed page (or an e-book).<\/p>\n

A major theme of the book is that ancient literature and culture is sometimes familiar in surprising ways: for instance, I trace connections between ancient comedy and contemporary hip-hop, and between Athenian tragedy and modern discourse about gendered violence and injustice. Conversely, another major theme of the book is that antiquity is often strange in ways we may not expect\u2014and that contemplating the past can enable us to see the strangeness and mutability of the present. For instance, in my essay on the myths surrounding Helen of Troy (also known as Helen of Sparta), I show that modern versions of this figure are sometimes more straightforwardly misogynistic than the ancient depictions. There is no linear progression of \u201cenlightenment\u201d from antiquity to the present day.<\/p>\n

LO<\/strong>: I learned an enormous amount from this book, both about translation and about the specifics of carrying ancient Greek and Roman literature across languages and cultures. There was a time when translating the classics was a standard part of education, particularly in England and the US. Students mostly stuck to word-for-word renderings, but even in that limited way, wasn\u2019t the exposure to how people think in other languages somehow world-opening? It made me wonder what we lose when the study of other languages and literatures disappears from education.<\/p>\n

EW<\/strong>: Thank you so much\u2014I\u2019m really thrilled the book was illuminating for you. I really hope that it\u2019s a fun read both for people with an interest in translation, and those with an interest in antiquity, and those who don\u2019t yet know that they might care about either of these subjects!<\/p>\n

I think exposure to other languages and other literatures and other cultures couldn\u2019t possibly be more important, however it is done. I felt grateful that I was able to send my kids to a charter school that had an immersion Spanish program, so they are all fluent, to varying degrees, in Spanish. Knowing the words and the stories of other cultures and other peoples opens the world, and invites us out of our own little bubbles, to the challenges and joys of dialogue. I wish every kid in the US or the world could be at the very least bilingual. I\u2019d also love to see more recognition and honor for the world-expanding, beautiful cultural knowledge and insights of communities where many or most people are bilingual or trilingual\u2014for instance in immigrant communities.<\/p>\n

Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea<\/i> focuses on the languages, literatures and stories of Greek and Roman antiquity, and one of my big themes is the importance of these cultural touch-stones for understanding our own world, in terms of what\u2019s special about modernity. We can\u2019t answer that question without an awareness of the past, just as we can\u2019t understand what is or is not special about English unless we can understand other languages. Every culture and every person has a different perspective on the world, and we need to listen deeply to as many of them as possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the most celebrated classicists writing today, Emily Wilson achieved a rare kind of literary stardom in 2017, when her translation of Homer\u2019s Odyssey made her the first woman to publish a complete English version of the epic. Her<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19787,"featured_media":276633,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,6,43072,43092,43073],"tags":[112107,28255,41770,3512,98863,9482,12278,1262],"class_list":["post-276397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-in-conversation","category-newsandculture","category-on-translation","tag-crossing-the-wine-dark-sea","tag-emily-wilson","tag-in-conversation","tag-interview","tag-leanne-ogasawara","tag-the-iliad","tag-the-odyssey","tag-translation"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19U1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Emily-Wilson.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19787"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276218,"date":"2026-09-08T05:10:23","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T09:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276218"},"modified":"2026-09-03T22:07:47","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T02:07:47","slug":"brian-dillon-on-what-virginia-woolfs-the-waves-means-to-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/brian-dillon-on-what-virginia-woolfs-the-waves-means-to-him\/","title":{"rendered":"Brian Dillon on What Virginia Woolf\u2019s The Waves<\/em> Means to Him"},"content":{"rendered":"

In time he will say that The Waves<\/em> by Virginia Woolf has been the most important novel in his life; but at twenty he does not use the word of this or any book, and would think it pompous, embarrassing, imprecise, conventional. The novel invites and shrouds and protects, then presses on him for years in recollection, worrying the edges of imagination.<\/p>\n

On November 28, 1928, Woolf wrote in her diary about The Waves<\/i>. The novel, she said, had surfaced or materialized while she was finishing To the Lighthouse <\/i>at Rodmell in Sussex: she looked from her window towards the marshes and was struck by the image of \u201ca fin in a waste of water.\u201d Or perhaps The Waves <\/i>arrived two years earlier, when she wondered what it would be to conceive and write a certain life: \u201cYet I am now and then haunted by the semi-mystic very profound life of a woman, which shall all be told on one occasion; and time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow blossom out of the past. One incident\u2014say the fall of a flower\u2014might contain it. My theory being that the actual event practically does not exist\u2014nor time either.\u201d Or was the origin of The Waves<\/i>, which Woolf published in 1931, to be found much further back, in the pages of The Voyage Out<\/i>, where Terence Hewet wishes to write a novel about silence, \u201cthe things people don\u2019t say. But the difficulty is immense.\u201d Difficult also to say where a book begins, or if it begins, and has not been washing or breaking over you from the start.<\/p>\n

It is tempting to say of this novel that it is Woolf \u2019s most abstract<\/i>\u2014on first reading, he recalls the little he knows about Cubism\u2014or, as at least three of the half-dozen copies he will eventually own declares on its cover, the most poetic<\/i>. In her earliest draft, which Woolf completed on April 20, 1930, poetry and abstraction have not yet lit everything up, clarifying and confounding in the same moment. In this first iteration of the novel Woolf had been calling The Moths<\/i>, she is herself still too present, too obviously working out, and even theorizing<\/i>, how this book should be. The breakthrough: realizing she had to give the novel over to her characters, who are at times hardly characters, barely distinguishable, and give it up also to an interrupting\u2014or is it invigilating, knowing and directing?\u2014voice, a narrator who speaks from nowhere and says nothing about the six speakers (and one non-speaker) who make up the cast of The Waves<\/i>. We start with this voice, its plain past tense which he will always misremember as an insistent present: \u201cThe sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Waves <\/i>does not teach but confirms that everything is also something else<\/i>.<\/p><\/i><\/p>\n

Perpetually, but only nine times in the course of the novel, the waves return, with them the light and the land, this voice attending, watching, listening, coining further images to describe the images it finds, turning every element in the scene into its luminous stand-in: \u201cthe sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Waves <\/i>does not teach but confirms that everything is also something else<\/i>. He has this lesson already by heart, in his bones, learned first from Roland Barthes, for whom meanings proliferate, the more oblique the better. He has not yet thought of this tendency, taste or doctrine of RB\u2019s in terms of metaphor<\/i>: a term drilled and defined into dullness at school\u2014crudely and artificially distinguished from simile<\/i>. Instead, RB\u2019s habit is a kind of bravado or affront, a refusal of the way things are, the way they ought to be. It\u2019s not that the veil of appearance\u2014of advertising, common sense, literature itself or photography\u2014is torn away, as Dennis Potter\u2019s review over-insisted on the back of B\u2019s copy of Mythologies<\/i>. Something else: unwarranted meanings off to the side\u2014per RB, connotations<\/i>. (He never reads the word without for a moment thinking: contaminations<\/i>.) The world of things, bodies, texts and sensations as a plane or a web of connections and diversions, all of it on the signifying surface.<\/p>\n

Depths are obfuscating<\/i>, Sontag says in her essay on RB. Turning one thing into another, reasoning and revealing that this <\/i>is in fact that<\/i>, is what he considers his task as a reader, student, critic, theorist<\/i>. And as a writer? A difference between RB and VW, between thought and poetry: in The Waves<\/i>, metaphoric becoming, mundane and secular transubstantiation, happens anew in almost every sentence, whereas RB seems to pursue a figure more thoroughly but it remains an event in his prose, not the pure texture of the writing. Transformation is how VW\u2019s writing proceeds: like <\/i>and like <\/i>and like<\/i>. It is one of the reasons (rhythm is another) she could not herself, so she wrote to Vita Sackville-West, tell prose from poetry.<\/p>\n

The Waves <\/i>is above all a book of images. These images can seem peculiarly static, ingrained or imprinted, especially when they sink from one character\u2019s soliloquy only to resurface elsewhere, as if these six, maybe all seven, can read each other\u2019s minds. (A collective telepathy when it comes to imagery is also a special power, or a curse, of characters in Shakespearean tragedy.) A fin in the waste of waters<\/i>, such as Woolf had seen or imagined through her window at Rodmell. An orientalist image of women with red pitchers on their heads, camels by the Nile. Scenes pictured in childhood through the greenery: a grand house where gardeners sweep the lawn with huge brooms. The merest details, pictures in the mind that are made of almost nothing: the wet metal of fish scales, a chain of silver bubbles rising from the bottom of a saucepan, white ships that are petals floating in a basin, the silver and glass (the persistence of things<\/i>) above with six or seven faces float in turn, like petals . Image on top of image<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Later, the book will seem a test of sorts, both in his own mind and the minds of various (male) writers and critics.<\/p>\n

Alongside these images, a profusion of metaphor, metonymy, simile: a richness of substitution, conjuring one thing out of another, proving all things subtly or strangely not themselves. This <\/i>is also that<\/i>. The narrator of the interludes is the novel\u2019s first coiner of comparisons: an addict of like <\/i>and as if<\/i>. \u201cThe wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine bottle has sunk and left the glass green.\u201d Bernard, the fabricator of phrases, is the book\u2019s second devotee of metaphor, therefore also the first to beguile the others with the potential and pitfalls of figural language. Neville, the future poet: \u201cBernard goes on talking. Up they bubble\u2014images. \u2018Like a camel\u2019\u00a0 \u2018a vulture.\u201d The camel is a vulture; the vulture is a camel; for Bernard is a dangling wire, loose but seductive. “Yes, for when he talks, when he makes his foolish comparisons, a lightness comes over one; one is freed; I have escaped, one feels.\u201d But metaphor\u2019s flight is also a trap, and Rhoda for one wants to get out of it: \u201c\u2018Like\u2019 and \u2018like\u2019 and \u2018like\u201d\u2014but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?\u201d<\/p>\n

He does not know it yet, but the extravagant metaphorical strain in Woolf, the feeling that all objects or bodies or views might translate at any second into any other, this quality is general across her work, essays as well as fiction, and will one day exercise and occupy him to an almost vexing degree: many hours of wonder and learning, years of envy and aspiration. At the same time, no ambition to read all of Woolf, no urge towards expertise or exhaustion, and always a hampering fear that the wrong <\/i>text will ruin her whole oeuvre or that of any other writer he loves. What if the same intensity of image cannot be found elsewhere in the work, what then? Decades later, because he has been avoiding it for decades, he will read in the pages of Orlando<\/i>: \u201cTrees were withered hags, and sheep were grey boulders. Everything, in fact, was something else.\u201d Woolf \u2019s love of metaphor\u2014her suspicion and mockery of it too.<\/p>\n

The strange unity of voice among the six speaking characters in The Waves<\/i>, their tendency to mimic, repeat or rhyme with each other\u2014how, if at all, does he understand this? As a pure and total aesthetic pattern, as a plane of iteration and recall, he finds it hypnotizing. A fascination and rapture, close to boredom, unlike anything he has read, so that it occurs to him he might open the book at any random page and start reading. He will never actually do this, compelled instead, when he finally rereads the novel in his fifties, to start over from the first page, and, having finished, start again, and again. After a certain point, he will probably be reading The Waves <\/i>for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n

He does not speak to his father about The Waves<\/i>. Among the peculiarities of the novel\u2019s depiction of childhood, youth, the procession into adulthood, is this: unlike many or most such portraits (including Joyce\u2019s Portrait<\/i>) here is a book in which parents are minimally present, as if they live in a separate, parallel world only now and then touching the lives of Woolf \u2019s characters\u2014like the droning grown-ups in Charlie Brown <\/i>cartoons. The Waves <\/i>is the only novel by Woolf that his father owns, but is it the only one he has read? The son does not think to ask. Later, the book will seem a test of sorts, both in his own mind and the minds of various (male) writers and critics, some of whom consider The Waves <\/i>unreadably extreme among Woolf \u2019s writings. You\u2019ve read <\/i>The Waves? You\u2019re a better man than I am! <\/i>Which means: You\u2019ve been taken in by this obvious sham, this pretentious and failed experiment? What is wrong with you? <\/i>The temptation exists to consider this hostility essentially English: an aspect of embarrassment, a century later, at the very fact of Woolf \u2019s modernism.<\/p>\n

But then he hears the same more baldly stated and without the element of comic Anglo self-deprecation, from an older (male) American writer. Unreadable, makes no sense<\/i>. Thirty-five years after first reading The Waves<\/i>, he is teaching an essay by Woolf\u2014\u201cOn Being Ill\u201d (1929)\u2014when one of his students announces that The Waves <\/i>is Woolf \u2019s greatest novel, much \u201cweirder\u201d than the others, and half the class eagerly agrees. What are they seeing, or hearing, that the wisdom of certain elders refuses? Formal audacity? A democracy of voices? Figural verve and peculiarity? Or is it the curious youthfulness of a novel in which even when old and near death its characters seem young?<\/p>\n

Somewhere in his reading he registers that Woolf lost her mother early\u2014Julia Stephen died in 1895, when her daughter was thirteen\u2014but he thinks nothing of it. He has not yet begun to wonder if the fact of his own mother\u2019s death affects him or signifies, except as embarrassment, except as an aspect of his past to be escaped as soon as life will allow. And then he learns that Woolf \u2019s father died when she was twenty-two.<\/p>\n

1989\u2014he is reading The Waves <\/i>in the back garden at home, which has just passed from the green overgrowth of early summer (exam time) to the burned aspect of high season. As he reads, and perhaps for the first time in his life, he too feels sunlit and gorged with time, with nostalgia for a period just passed. He has never before imagined that childhood, his kind of childhood, might be a subject for serious writing. The early pages of The Waves <\/i>are liquid with green light, the garden or grounds a place of languor and surprise, sudden kisses, bright animal eyes, solitary daydream and jealousy. The mood into which the novel puts B is unlike any provoked in him before, not by a book at any rate: the lazing, rapt aesthetic inventories of Wilde and Huysmans now seem tasteless and immature, RB\u2019s verbal and syntactic joys and rigors remain at some mental distance from the reading body, which with Woolf (or this version of Woolf) feels thrilled and lulled at the same time, stunned and debilitated in the exercise of a supreme concentration that verges often on boredom, somnolence, a sinking in and out of himself, towards and away from the page. He cannot swim, but feels himself fully immersed <\/i>in this book. He has read difficult <\/i>novels since his mid-teens\u2014though not yet for university, not really\u2014and strangely voiced, abstractly attentive poets (his father\u2019s cool blue Faber collection of Emily Dickinson) outside of any academic situation. He could not say that Woolf \u2019s novel interests <\/i>him as he has been interested by some of the writers he is asked to read at college: certain Jacobean revenge tragedies, the odes of John Keats, A Tale of a Tub <\/i>by Jonathan Swift, Edgar Allen Poe\u2019s story \u201cThe Purloined Letter\u201d, the Anglo-Saxon \u201cWife\u2019s Lament.\u201d These and others ignite an intellectual vigilance and formal inquiry or adventure in him\u2014he hardly thinks, for example, about the emotional import of the odes, or the actual mystery in Poe\u2014instances of which amount over years to a training, a body of learning, though he never experiences it as such. No writing has done this <\/i>to him: for the duration of his reading The Waves <\/i>he goes down into a reverie or stupor, about which some remaining lucid part of him is uncertain how to feel. Is this a depth of literary experience to which he must give in, or an aesthetic spell verging on kitsch? Has he construed all this beauty incorrectly, falling for it fully when he should be alert to formal experiment, the dissolution of character, diminution of plot, the austere adventure of Modernism? And what of a certain sociological <\/i>aspect? Why is he reading about these sad but gilded English lives of a century (is it a century?) ago, succumbing at the end of the 1980s to this gorged and gorgeous sensibility so remote from his own time and place? He is painfully aware of the novel as wholly new and unnervingly old-fashioned.<\/p>\n

It is the first novel he has ever read that makes him consider seriously the form <\/i>of a human life.<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

From<\/em> Ambivalence: An Education<\/a> by Brian Dillon. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Available from New York Review Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In time he will say that The Waves by Virginia Woolf has been the most important novel in his life; but at twenty he does not use the word of this or any book, and would think it pompous, embarrassing,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1742,"featured_media":276635,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070],"tags":[112019,17343,19379,1764,71613,168,30465,659],"class_list":["post-276218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","tag-ambivalence-an-education","tag-brian-dillon","tag-metaphor","tag-new-york-review-books","tag-on-reading","tag-reading","tag-the-waves","tag-virginia-woolf","story-type-on-reading"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19R8","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-waves.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1742"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276389,"date":"2026-09-08T05:08:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T09:08:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276389"},"modified":"2026-09-04T13:42:59","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T17:42:59","slug":"how-and-why-we-find-ourselves-trapped-by-our-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-and-why-we-find-ourselves-trapped-by-our-jobs\/","title":{"rendered":"How\u2014and Why\u2014We Find Ourselves Trapped By Our Jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leo Tolstoy should have been triumphant. By the 1880s, the Russian novelist had written the masterpieces War and Peace <\/i>and Anna Karenina<\/i>, achieving what he\u2019d spent his life pursuing.<\/p>\n

But he was consumed with despair.<\/p>\n

On paper, Tolstoy embodied success in every dimension of nineteenth-century Russian life. He was a literary genius. He was a privileged aristocrat. And he was a father and husband, with a marriage that would last nearly five decades and yield thirteen children. Yet these distinctions only intensified his anxiety as he questioned what they meant\u2014and if he even wanted them anymore. He was increasingly uncertain about who he was, and worse: whether he wanted to keep being that way.<\/p>\n

In 1882, in his fifties, Tolstoy finished writing A Confession\u2014<\/i>a raw exploration of his looming crisis. \u201cI felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWhat I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.\u201d<\/p>\n

The questions tormented him. Who was the real Tolstoy? And more urgently, could he change?<\/p>\n

More than a century later, in a different country and a completely different life, those same questions would surface again\u2014not in the mind of a Russian novelist at the height of his career, but in a fledgling actress deciding whether she wanted to continue to be one at all. Peyton McDavitt knew her move to Hollywood was a gamble, aimed at making up for lost time. She\u2019d loved acting as a kid, performing in school plays and regional theater. But as she grew older, acting felt like an all-or-nothing proposition whose pursuit required abandoning everything else she cared about: school, sports, music. So she\u2019d let it go.<\/p>\n

Rigid identities mean that who and what we\u2019ve been keeps us from becoming anyone or anything else.<\/p>\n

But acting was still her dream job. And finally, at twenty-three, she was ready to commit to it the way she committed to anything she did: completely. \u201cI knew I was going to regret not knowing what might happen if I didn\u2019t try,\u201d she told me. \u201cI had to go find out.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same work ethic that had made her a top student and an All-American athlete would fuel her acting career. At least, that was the plan.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t easy. Out in Hollywood, she waited tables at trendy restaurants, serving her friends and fellow actors who had already broken through. She babysat. She tutored. She took a gig driving an industry executive\u2019s kid to school.<\/p>\n

That was fine; she loved the hustle. She loved the challenge of cobbling together her small jobs into a sustainable career. And she loved the craft itself. Each audition was a puzzle to solve, each role a chance to disappear into someone else\u2019s mind. She wasn\u2019t chasing money or fame. This was just how she wanted to spend her days.<\/p>\n

Finally, on the cusp of thirty, she realized she had made it. She was booking regular acting work, enough to quit her day jobs, and was living out the dream she\u2019d come to Hollywood to pursue.<\/p>\n

But something was wrong. As time went on, auditions became mechanical. Getting rejected felt like nothing, or even relief. Sometimes even the victory of landing a role felt hollow. While driving to callbacks, she\u2019d find herself fantasizing about other careers, other versions of herself and who she could be.<\/p>\n

It was unsettling. Acting had become exactly what she\u2019d wanted it to be: her identity, her source of income, and the foundation of her social life.<\/p>\n

And just as with Tolstoy, that was the problem. Doubt crept in.<\/p>\n

Was this still what she wanted?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Of course, claiming an identity can be something we do deliberately. Tolstoy had devoted his life to creating world-defining literature; he was a novelist. As McDavitt sought to build a life around her chosen craft, at a certain point, she wasn\u2019t just acting anymore. She was an actress.<\/p>\n

Sometimes you\u2019re just associated with your job, whether you like it or not. I\u2019m in marketing. I tutor. I\u2019m in sales. <\/i>Your boyfriend\u2019s family wants to know what you do and even though it\u2019s mostly how you afford your rent, when you answer, you know they\u2019ve ascribed this thing you get paid for as core to how they view you overall. So we come to see ourselves this way, too. We become an actress or a soccer player or an existential Russian novelist partly as a way of communicating who we are to the rest of the world. The labels also help us understand ourselves.<\/p>\n

These dynamics aren\u2019t new. Since at least the Middle Ages, jobs in many European cultures have defined our public and personal identities, to the point where they became our very names. The most common last name in Germany and Switzerland is M\u00fcller, meaning \u201cmiller,\u201d or a person who grinds grain. In the UK, it\u2019s Smith\u2014someone who makes things from metal. Russia has thousands of Kuznetsovs (from \u201csmith\u201d). When she became an actress, McDavitt changed her name as well\u2014a symbolic shift that showed how completely she had merged with her goal and transformed herself for it.<\/p>\n

When these were medieval jobs we inherited or were assigned, quitting meant breaking out of roles that were imposed on us. Today, it\u2019s different. We expect our careers to intersect with our calling, to reflect what we want to get out of life. Claiming our identity as a nurse, a lawyer, a painter is the reward for our hard work. Our nouns are a prize we earn.<\/p>\n

That means it\u2019s easy to get caught in an identity trap, where we create rigid identities instead of flexible ones. Whether in school, or at work, or elsewhere in our steady march through life, we check the boxes laid out for us and eventually hit some milestone that serves as an inflection point. We become who we are\u2014and are meant to stay that way. Psychologists have a phrase for this experience: \u201cidentity foreclosure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even when we want to change, we\u2019re held back, if only to avoid confronting the question of who we\u2019ll be once what we do has ended. Rigid identities mean that who and what we\u2019ve been keeps us from becoming anyone or anything else.<\/p>\n

These self-definitions are often quite narrow. From the time we\u2019re students, we\u2019re told to specialize, to pick one path. Select one major. Get one job. Build one career. Dabbling gets ridiculed; consistency, rewarded. Resist committing to a path and you\u2019re a dilettante, a waffler. And if you leave the path you\u2019ve chosen? Then you\u2019ve claimed the worst identity of all: you\u2019re a quitter.<\/p>\n

Success gets measured by forever. A successful career builds steadily until retirement. A successful marriage lasts until death. A successful person makes decisions and sticks to them.<\/p>\n

Our identity defines us. Then it confines us. Once those questions of who we are are settled, we\u2019re disincentivized from revisiting them.<\/p>\n

Technology reinforces these rigid identities. On the internet, our words outlast our views. Anyone can take our photo and keep it on their phone\u2014a permanent record of our potentially unintentional presentation to the world. Those who follow us online expect consistency, not nuance or experimentation, let alone a pivot to something new. Even deleting doesn\u2019t make the digital remnants of who we\u2019ve been disappear. It\u2019s all still there, somewhere. We may have reincarnated, but the ghosts of our former selves linger on.<\/p>\n

It can make every decision feel impossibly heavy, especially in our early years, as we second-guess if we truly want to commit. \u201cOne of the terrifying aspects of the twenties is the inner conviction that the choices we make are irrevocable,\u201d wrote Gail Sheehy in her classic book Passages<\/i>. \u201cIf we choose a graduate school or join a firm, get married or don\u2019t marry, move to the suburbs or forego travel abroad, decide against children or against a career, we fear in our marrow that we might have to live with that choice forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our identity defines us. Then it confines us. Once those questions of who we are are settled, we\u2019re disincentivized from revisiting them. So what if we want to change? We can\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Circling back to Peyton McDavitt, acting had become her identity. When people asked what she did, she answered in terms of what she was: \u201cI\u2019m an actress.\u201d That was a sign of victory\u2014the reward for earning the dream job she spent years trying to achieve. Finally, she had turned her verbs into nouns.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was such a precious thing,\u201d she told me. \u201cI loved it. I could do it. I was satisfied.\u201d<\/p>\n

But as she grew older, her idea of a dream job changed. There were structural problems. Acting may have been a career, but it was made up of individual jobs, which increasingly failed to support the lifestyle she wanted as she got older. The schedule was unpredictable; managing her finances became exhausting. She realized her personal goals and her career goals were no longer aligned. As she entered her thirties, she started to worry: \u201cAm I ever going to be able to buy a house doing this, or even make enough cash to save?\u201d<\/p>\n

Even the work itself felt different. She shot a show in Hawaii that got canceled abruptly; it was like whiplash, from success to starting over. Meanwhile, she watched a friend book his second part ever, and then catapult into stardom. That kind of randomness used to be exciting; now, it was maddening. One day she was en route to an audition and had a moment of clarity. She was traveling hours to try out for a role as Hooker Vampire #4. <\/i>She didn\u2019t even want to be Hooker Vampire #1. <\/i>Yes, she could keep pushing to become more successful, to make more money, to become more established in her field. But she had already achieved a version of this\u2014enough to guess what the path ahead might look like if she did achieve those things. But did she even still want them? Would more make her happy? What was she doing this for?<\/p>\n

\u201cTo continue seemed like the definition of insanity,\u201d she said. \u201cIt just wasn\u2019t working anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Excerpted from<\/em> The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out<\/a> by Lindsay Crouse. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Lindsay Crouse. Reprinted by permission of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leo Tolstoy should have been triumphant. By the 1880s, the Russian novelist had written the masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina, achieving what he\u2019d spent his life pursuing. But he was consumed with despair. On paper, Tolstoy embodied success<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31889,"featured_media":276434,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43287,43092],"tags":[3100,27206,56926,37361,1045,6595,11311,112103,12246,5671,112104],"class_list":["post-276389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-health","category-newsandculture","tag-careers","tag-fulfillment","tag-harpercollins-publishers","tag-harperone","tag-identity","tag-jobs","tag-labels","tag-lindsay-crouse","tag-psychology","tag-self-help","tag-the-case-for-quitting-the-surprising-benefits-of-opting-out","story-type-psychology"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19TT","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/office.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31889"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276284,"date":"2026-09-08T05:06:59","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T09:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276284"},"modified":"2026-09-05T21:52:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T01:52:01","slug":"what-the-ghetto-of-venice-reveals-about-jewish-history-and-identity-in-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/what-the-ghetto-of-venice-reveals-about-jewish-history-and-identity-in-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Ghetto of Venice Reveals About Jewish History and Identity in Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n

\u201cBut how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
\nWhat stuff \u2019tis made of, whereof it is born,
\nI am to learn\u2026\u201d
\n\u2013William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice<\/em>, 1.1.3-5
\n*<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It was a cold January afternoon when I first came to the Ghetto. I got there much later than I had hoped. I had spent much of the day elsewhere and had lost track of time. It was already beginning to get dark. The campo<\/em> seemed deserted. Shutters were closed and, apart from the tinkling of water in the wells, there was hardly a sound. There were no streetlights; barely even the glimmer of a lamp. But in the branches of the trees, thousands of tiny lights were shining.<\/p>\n

Having nothing else to do, I wandered idly across the square. On a wall opposite, I spotted an imposing bronze plaque. It was hard to make out in the gloom. Squinting, I could just see the image of a train pulling what looked like trucks. Hundreds of people\u2014and around them, soldiers with guns. I caught my breath\u2014a sharp intake of icy air. Behind the plaque, in a large irregular recess set with a metal grille, there was an inscription with names. Not far off, there was another with a date. I picked out the numbers slowly. 5 December 1943. I stopped. 5 December. My birthday.<\/p>\n

Just then, I heard a sound coming from my right. A gentle song, joyful and defiant. Turning, I saw a light in a ground-floor window and a small group of men dressed in black, shawls pulled up, nodding their heads in prayer. Then it struck me. It was Friday. The Sabbath was beginning. Something stabbed at my heart. Without knowing why, I burst into tears.<\/p>\n

Most of all, the Ghetto\u2019s story is a testament of hope. Despite all they endured, its inhabitants not merely survived but thrived.<\/p>\n

It was in that moment that my fascination for the Venetian Ghetto began. Although I did not realize it at the time, I had glimpsed\u2014felt<\/em>\u2014the essence of its past. To most of us, the word \u2018ghetto\u2019 will be familiar. We know the tragic stories of the Warsaw Ghetto, the \u0141\u00f3d\u017a Ghetto, and the horrors which followed. We have heard it used of the \u2018imprisoned cities\u2019 of Black Americans in parts of Harlem and Chicago, Brownsville and Detroit. We have seen it reimagined in poems and songs. But it was there, in an out-of-the-way corner of Cannaregio, that the word\u2014and its benighted history\u2014was born.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In many ways, there was nothing particularly new about the Venetian Ghetto. It was certainly not the first time Jews had been confined to a quarter which was ‘obligatory, separate, and enclosed.’ Far from it: by the time it was established on March 29, 1516, the practice of enforced segregation was already a painfully familiar feature of European life. From at least the thirteenth century, Jews in Prague, Frankfurt-am-Main, Marseilles, and more than a dozen other cities had been required to live in specified neighborhoods, cut off from the surrounding area by barriers and iron gates.<\/p>\n

But the Ghetto was not \u2018just\u2019 the culmination of earlier trends. There was no conscious effort to model it after Jewish quarters elsewhere, no clear awareness of its past, and no vision of how it might evolve more than a handful of years in the future. Rather, it was an ad hoc creation, occasioned by the tumult of the Italian Wars, and framed by Venice\u2019s\u2014perhaps myopic\u2014determination to reconcile religious prejudice with its most pressing economic needs.<\/p>\n

Like many other European states, Venice had long regarded Jews as a threat to its Christian identity. Preachers and patricians constantly warned that, if allowed to live unchecked in the city, Jews would \u2018infect\u2019 the Christian faithful, poisoning the minds of the pious and stealing souls away from salvation. Yet the Venetian government knew that it could not manage without<\/em> a Jewish presence, either. By the early sixteenth century, the Republic\u2019s economy was already showing signs of decline. The \u2018working poor\u2019 were especially vulnerable, but since the Venetians were unable\u2013or unwilling\u2014to offer any form of credit on their own account, they had no choice but to rely on Jewish moneylenders instead. The Ghetto was simply the easiest way of allowing Jewish loans to keep flowing while keeping the spiritual \u2018risks\u2019 to a minimum.<\/p>\n

At first, it was intended to be a temporary measure; yet the collapse of Venice\u2019s maritime trade\u2014once the guarantor of its prosperity\u2014demanded that the Ghetto not only be retained but expanded. Jewish merchants, originally from Spain and Portugal, were invited to make the Ghetto their home and, in doing so, help revive Venice\u2019s flagging commerce with the Levant. One Ghetto swiftly became three; and as long as Venice\u2019s fortunes continued to worsen, their existence was all but guaranteed\u2014so much so that, by the mid-seventeenth century, their status could well be regarded as a barometer of Venice\u2019s decline.<\/p>\n

Though each of the Ghetto\u2019s three areas (the Ghetto Nuovo, the Ghetto Vecchio, and the Ghetto Nuovissimo) retained its own, distinct character until remarkably late, it was always cramped, unsanitary, and marred by privation. Its residents were subject not just to innumerable petty restrictions, but to an ineradicable, if often variable, hostility. Comparisons with Shakespeare\u2019s The Merchant of Venice<\/em> are invidious, but perhaps unavoidable. Although most scholars now agree that Shylock\u2019s \u2018pound of flesh\u2019 owes more to antisemitic hysteria in London than to daily life in the lagoon, the abuse he suffers at Antonio\u2019s hand in the Rialto market would not have been all that unrecognizable, at least in a slightly earlier period. Insults were common, threats familiar. Accusations of blood libel periodically recurred. Physical attacks were not unknown. There are cases of Jewish corpses being abused on their way to the cemetery; and even one instance of a father watching as his son was stabbed to death in the street.<\/p>\n

Over the 300 years of its existence, the Ghetto became a byword for the forcible segregation of Jewish communities. And after its gates were finally pulled down, it lived on\u2014as much in mind as in space. To borrow James Baldwin\u2019s phrase, its limits were \u2018set forever.\u2019 Jews, though relieved of their financial burdens and recognized as citizens, often struggled to escape the Ghetto\u2019s shadow, and Venetian antisemitism, shorn of its religious mantle, took on the more vicious garb of race.<\/p>\n

The Ghetto\u2019s tale is anything but simple, however. Though its high walls were intended to protect the Christian population, they sometimes did more to defend the Jewish people within. Particularly after Venice\u2019s break with the papacy in the early seventeenth century, the government went to great lengths to shield judaizers from the Inquisition\u2019s glare and recast the Ghetto as a refuge. On other occasions, its walls could be remarkably porous. The Ghetto was, after all, founded in the expectation of regular exchange between Jews and Christians and was enlarged in the hope that it would be a window of sorts onto the East. Jews often lived outside the Ghetto; and, at times, Christians made their homes inside its walls. Conversions were common; apostasy not unknown; and the presence so-called Marranos (Jews from Spain or Portugal who had converted to Christianity) made it virtually impossible to draw a clear distinction between religious communities. Even at the height of Jewish segregation, Jews might work in partnership with Christians, call on Christians to arbitrate in disputes, or be welcomed into Christian homes as friends. And once segregation was ended, we find Jewish councillors at the heart of civic politics, Jewish restaurants being haunted by Venetian gourmands, and Jewish soldiers taking their place in the struggle first for Italian unity, then for Italian freedom.<\/p>\n

The longer I have studied this most remarkable place…the more clearly have I come to see its essential truth: that its greatest monument is its endurance; its greatest blessing, its memory; and its greatest hope, its people.<\/p>\n

Most of all, the Ghetto\u2019s story is a testament of hope. Despite all they endured, its inhabitants not merely survived but thrived. They were, in a sense, a microcosm of the Jewish world. Having all fled persecution abroad, the early residents belonged to three \u2018national\u2019 groupings, worshipped according to two separate rites (Ashkenazi and Sephardic), and spoke any number of different languages. At various times, they practiced a dizzying range of professions: from doctors and rag-traders to merchants and copy-editors. More than once, they helped keep the Venetian economy from collapse. They founded no fewer than eight glittering synagogues, each a masterpiece of its kind; they founded innumerable charities; and they administered their own affairs with democratic probity. They were poets and scientists, musicians and philosophers; they put on plays and held festivals; and they transformed Venice into the greatest centre for Hebrew printing in the world. And almost five centuries after the Ghetto\u2019s foundation\u2014long after the horrors of the Holocaust\u2014I found them still there, on that cold winter evening, proud, defiant, and full of hope.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In looking back at the Ghetto\u2019s past, I have used three lenses. The first is context. As will perhaps already be apparent, the Ghetto is a product of much wider Jewish diasporas. Those who lived there came as refugees or migrants from Germany, Spain, Portugal, the Ottoman Empire, modern Ukraine\u2014and perhaps even beyond; and the Ghetto\u2019s story cannot be told except through their own. At the same time, it is equally impossible to understand the Ghetto except in relation to Venice\u2019s own fortunes. Just as the Ghetto\u2019s foundation was precipitated (if not necessarily caused) by the catastrophic defeats Venice suffered during the Italian Wars, so its subsequent history was shaped by the decline of Venetian shipping, its fractious relationship with the Ottoman Empire and the papacy, its shift towards the land, and its subjugation\u2014to France, to Austria, and finally to Italy. I have therefore tried to link the daily happenings in Cannaregio with the bigger picture as clearly as I can. As will become clear, this has often necessitated giving a good deal of attention to Venice\u2019s economic situation, the state of its public finances and\u2014most of all\u2014the workings of credit markets. These are, understandably, often rather tricky topics; but I have done my best to avoid unnecessary technicalities whenever possible.<\/p>\n

The second lends is environment. Although the Ghetto\u2019s story often unfolds across a large canvas, as a tale of negotiations and charters, wars and finances, the Ghetto itself was never anything less than a lived environment. Whatever the squalls raging about, those few small blocks structured and shaped the daily lives of Venice\u2019s Jewish population. It was there, in those squares and streets, that people had their homes, ate their meals, celebrated, worshipped, and mourned. The fabric of the Ghetto is the warp and weft of its social existence. At each stage of the narrative, I have therefore tried to give as clear an impression as I can of the built environment and its evolution: the state of the tenements, the shops and synagogues, the wells, drains, and bridges. In this, I have been helped immeasurably by the abundance of primary materials still available and by the many wonderful studies which have been produced in recent decades, most notably by Donatella Calabi, Ennio Concina, and Ugo Camerino\u2014not to mention the outstanding conservation work which has preserved so many of the Ghetto\u2019s buildings for posterity.<\/p>\n

The third is personalities. Although this book traces the Ghetto\u2019s history from the arrival of the first Jews in Venice down to the present day\u2014a period of some 700 years\u2014it is above all a story of individuals. The Ghetto itself was a place to live; and though its fate was often shaped by factors beyond the control of any one person, it was always a living community of families, friends, acquaintances, and rivals. As such, I have tried to tell the Ghetto\u2019s tale through the experiences, and (where possible) the voices of its inhabitants. Particularly for earlier periods, this has, admittedly, not always been easy. Far fewer first-hand accounts have come down to us than we might like. As a result, non-Jewish sources have necessarily had to be privileged, a fact which has the unfortunate effect of reinforcing Jewish exclusion. From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, however, the situation is quite different. Thanks to the wealth of materials which have survived, we are fortunate to be able to reconstruct many lives in exceptional detail. Some of these are \u2018significant\u2019 figures who made some noteworthy contribution to cultural, political, or religious life, or who are otherwise well represented in the documentary record, such as the poet Sara Copia Sullam, the learned rabbi Leon Modena, the revolutionary Daniele Manin, and the doctor Giuseppe Jona. But I have tried too, balance these with the lives of more ordinary people, too, like Simc\u00e0 Todesca, the housewife who found a baby on her doorstep, and the children who were separated from their parents during the Second World War.<\/p>\n

This book cannot pretend to completeness, however. It is the historian\u2019s curse to see the past through a glass darkly; and even the most strenuous efforts afford nothing more than a brief and incomplete glimpse into the Ghetto\u2019s history. Yet the longer I have studied this most remarkable place, the more deeply I have dug into its records and remains, the more clearly have I come to see its essential truth: that its greatest monument is its endurance; its greatest blessing, its memory; and its greatest hope, its people.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

From<\/em> The First Ghetto: Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism<\/a> by Alexander Lee. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. <\/em>The First Ghetto has been shortlisted for the 2026 Cundill History Prize<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cBut how I caught it, found it, or came by it, What stuff \u2019tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn\u2026\u201d \u2013William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1.1.3-5 * It was a cold January afternoon when I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31838,"featured_media":276391,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43101,43092],"tags":[111978,63849,40901,11854,60417,12167,52657,5495,34399,112048,15921],"class_list":["post-276284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-history","category-newsandculture","tag-2026-cundill-history-prize","tag-alexander-lee","tag-antisemitism","tag-basic-books","tag-cundill-history-prize","tag-europe","tag-hachette-book-group","tag-italy","tag-jewish-culture","tag-the-first-ghetto-venice-and-the-origins-of-modern-antisemitism","tag-venice","story-type-cundill-history-prize"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Sc","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/life-ghetto-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31838"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276585,"date":"2026-09-08T05:06:47","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T09:06:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276585"},"modified":"2026-09-05T21:49:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T01:49:23","slug":"this-week-in-literary-history-william-s-burroughs-kills-joan-vollmer-in-a-drunken-game-of-william-tell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/this-week-in-literary-history-william-s-burroughs-kills-joan-vollmer-in-a-drunken-game-of-william-tell\/","title":{"rendered":"This Week in Literary History: William S. Burroughs Kills Joan Vollmer in a Drunken Game of \u201cWilliam Tell\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

This first appeared in Lit Hub\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Literary History\u00a0newsletter\u2014sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

On the afternoon of September 6, 1951, in a friend\u2019s Mexico City apartment, a drunk William S. Burroughs pulled out his handgun and (supposedly) said to his wife, Joan Vollmer<\/a>, \u201cIt\u2019s time for our William Tell act.\u201d Vollmer (supposedly) laughed and placed a drinking glass on top of her head. Burroughs, known to be an expert shot, fired his gun, but missed the glass and instead shot Vollmer in the head, killing her. She was 28<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Before her death, Vollmer had been an influential member<\/a> of the Beat Generation; the apartment she shared with Edie Parker was a favored gathering place for Burroughs and his friends, including Jack Kerouac (who Edie would later marry), Allen Ginsberg, and Lucien Carr. \u201cBrilliant and well versed in philosophy and literature, Joan was the whetstone against which the main Beat writers\u2014Allen, Jack, and Bill\u2014sharpened their intellect,\u201d wrote Brenda Knight in The Women of the Beat Generation<\/em>. \u201cWidely considered one of the most perceptive people in the group, her strong mind and independent nature helped bulldoze the Beats toward a new sensibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then she was gone. Burroughs was arrested and held on murder charges for two weeks; he later (after speaking to a lawyer) changed his story<\/a>, as he would several times, telling a judge that his gun had misfired. He was convicted of criminal negligence and served little time in jail. The details remain unproveable, and reports of the event vary<\/a>, even from the few eyewitnesses, but the legend has remained. If you know one thing about Burroughs, you probably know this.<\/p>\n

Later, in his introduction to Queer<\/em><\/a>, Burroughs wrote: \u201cI am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan\u2019s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing.” He added, “I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This first appeared in Lit Hub\u2019s\u00a0Literary History\u00a0newsletter\u2014sign up here. On the afternoon of September 6, 1951, in a friend\u2019s Mexico City apartment, a drunk William S. Burroughs pulled out his handgun and (supposedly) said to his wife, Joan Vollmer, \u201cIt\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":276586,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43101],"tags":[77665,108293,5685],"class_list":["post-276585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-history","tag-joan-vollmer","tag-this-week-in-literary-history","tag-william-burroughs","story-type-literary-history"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19X3","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/williamtell-copy.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275668,"date":"2026-09-08T04:54:38","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T08:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275668"},"modified":"2026-09-05T21:56:29","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T01:56:29","slug":"how-to-be-a-black-author","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-to-be-a-black-author\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cHow to be a Black Author\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

After Lorrie Moore and Kiese Laymon.<\/em><\/p>\n

You chose this program based on money and because you never had a Black person of any gender teach you anything about writing or reading. You learned math and Black Studies and the safest way to blow and push life into another person from other Black people, but none of them had taught you how to tell a story.<\/p>\n

There is a family legend about how you learned how to read, that one day you were sitting at a kitchen table, four years old, beads in your hair because you were fresh back from a visit to your Mom-Mom\u2019s, and you said something like, \u201cGood morning. I hate Mondays. Lasagna,\u201d and your parents realized you were reading a comic aloud to yourself. Reading came to you like a sudden burst into fruit brought forth by unseen winds.<\/p>\n

You wanted a lineage. Sometimes, creating one doesn\u2019t take generations upon generations. It can be established, at least in the arts, with the right, thoughtful conversation or idea passed around a table in two hours and forty-five minutes on a rainy Tuesday afternoon.<\/p>\n

I want to tell you that you\u2019ll make it through this year. But did you?<\/p>\n

The first time you all met as a class that semester, your most boring white classmate turned in a story that was about himself but named something cooler like \u201cAlistair\u201d or \u201cParker.\u201d Last year, you had read an infamous essay about women and likability that he had found offensive. You had personally found the essay a little boring in the duh-yes-of course way essays can be when they take on something you have personally experienced. The only marginalia you had bothered to write was Girl, you are preaching to the choir. <\/em>But this classmate had gotten somehow so upset with the author\u2019s phrasing, the way she treated men, that he had cried in the classroom. You had seen him lurking outside of after-class Guinnesses\u2014the cheapest beer in the happy hour special\u2014crying still, face mottled red, and typing something on his cell phone. All his stories were about young, misunderstood white men gazing at water and thinking about misdeeds that they never actually did in-scene. You and your friends sometimes called him Mr. Flashbacks. Sometimes, you called him Mr. Future NBA in Fiction.<\/p>\n

You listened to how your Black professor told him that his descriptions were \u201cmiraculous.\u201d She talked about Carver and interplays of emotion and reality and wasn\u2019t water ancestral? Her hair was thick and natural. You could see the effort she put into her curls being separated. Her glasses were red and slid down her nose. You were always a sponge for details. She was wearing a suit and a T-shirt underneath it with a picture of an iconic Black author and the word \u201cfree\u201d in all caps. Most of your class was nodding along almost in perfect synch. \u201cThis,\u201d your professor said in a serious, lovely voice, \u201cis what literature should be. This is reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

And this should have been your first warning bell. Your idea of literature was always built in seeing a saturated world filled with people dealing with the uncanny. Once, you wrote a story that was about a woman who had been sexually assaulted off-screen and she spent the entire story turning into a tree, until at the end, the man who had assaulted her stopped in and chopped her into bricks and turned her into a poorly built chair. The workshop you were in called it \u201cpolemic,\u201d \u201ccruel,\u201d and \u201cweird.\u201d<\/p>\n

And you read a book by a white writer where strange things happened in a lyrical way, girls kept becoming puppets or cake or being murdered and reawakening as their killer\u2019s Vitamix, and this was meant to teach you something about feminism, you knew that from being in the academy for so long, but in your heart, you felt like it was something people had done for years and years. You got it. Society made women feel like objects! But you spent the ninety minutes allotted for talking about the book mostly doodling because it seemed like almost everyone else found this profound. There was a phrase you hated but it felt appropriate in the moment: why yuck someone\u2019s yum? And it was a relief to hear everyone take seriously a book that was marginally adjacent to work you might do.<\/p>\n

You wrote a story with a main character based on a girl you hated winning the lottery and then being suddenly attacked by a pack of dogs on the beach for the ticket. They used the money to save their animal shelter. She was going to use the money to go to Paris and go on a shopping spree and change her name to Yvonne. Most of the people in workshop didn\u2019t even bother to write a response to that one. Your only friend in the class wrote a letter but it was filled with puns like, \u201cI woofed the moment when the gang of dogs appeared.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be honest, even you did not think these stories were good. There were times where you stayed up all night staring at your bedroom ceiling and wondering when you would get any better. But at least, you weren\u2019t writing about writers, you would tell yourself and pull the covers over your head. Sometimes, you fell asleep. Sometimes, you thought about how your parents\u2019 house was being foreclosed on, how some weekends you went home and figured out what to give away and watched as your dad burned some of your old school tests in the backyard. It was embarrassing to tell your parents that every day you cared so much about make-believe and style and fake people that it could keep you awake at night. You told them that you were enjoying yourself.<\/p>\n

That semester, you were writing a story that at its heart was you talking to yourself about how you were constantly torn between never wanting to die and being sometimes suddenly so desperate to be done with this world. The summer before, so many Black men and Black children and Black women had been murdered for the most meager of real or imagined offenses. A toy gun in a park, an argument with the wrong person in public, shoplifting a soda, missing a stop sign, not being honest. You would read the articles and think about a time where you and your dad were pulled over. They took your dad out of the car. One police officer stayed with you, always slurring you in every question he asked, he asked you about drugs and prostitution and would you suck his dick, and the only thing you knew how to do was stay very still and call him sir and you could tell he liked that you were little mouse limp. Your therapist said you had PTSD but you didn\u2019t want to believe it. Your dad had lived. You had lived. But here you were writing a haunted house story that if you looked sideways at it, there were all the things you could feel baking inside your brain and throat each time you read a news article that summer or read a tweet that began, Rest in Power.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, I think we died that night. That we, too, were taken out of the car and beaten and thrown in a ditch. That our father died, too. And some great angel couldn\u2019t stop the two of us from dying, but came down later and prayed and prayed until the heaven we had was one where we never died. She couldn\u2019t erase what had happened to us but let us continue forward. Can you really have heaven if you die in the worst possible conditions? But maybe heaven is always predicated on a kind of benevolent amnesia where you have to breathe in clouds and sweet grass and breathe out every wrong until enough of the wrong inside you dissipates into a forgotten mist.<\/p>\n

In your workshop story, a Black girl goes into a haunted house. On floor one, she is chased by white workers dressed as the wolfman and Ghost Face and killers. Floor two, there are actual monsters mixed in. On the final floor, she is met by an ancient evil that is wearing an expensive business suit. He kills her. She has paid ten dollars to die.<\/p>\n

When you brought the story into workshop, most of your white classmates were silent and so was your professor. She let the brilliant writers of color around you talk about their ideas of reality and unreality, what is haunted house literature, and was the United States itself a kind of haunted house of racial reckoning? The type of questions that can feel profound or vastly stupid depending on where you\u2019re sitting at the table. You were glad to hear their thoughts, but your gaze kept drifting to her, to the way she wouldn\u2019t really look at you, at how she kept curling her hair around her fingers. There was something she wanted to say, you felt.<\/p>\n

But you took notes and later, you could barely read what<\/p>\n

you had written because so many thoughts were coming so quickly and as always you had stream-of-consciousnessed it, so that it looked like: is-it-too-much-that-all-the-workers-of-the-haunted-house-are white-and-i\u2019m-so-hungry-why-did-i-forget-a-snack. You left happy that some people had taken your writing seriously but sad because you felt lonely in the way that only creativity could; your ambition and skills were still on two separate paths.<\/p>\n

After class, you took a long walk and reminded yourself of a family story. Your Mom-Mom had a natural talent for piano is what your mom always said. She was never formally trained but could hear any song and figure out within a few minutes how to play it. And it was true. One time when you were a child, you watched as she went from playing \u201cMoonlight Sonata\u201d to \u201cHot in Here\u201d back to the sonata and then into a beautiful rendition of \u201cHow Will I Know.\u201d \u201cEverything has notes,\u201d she said. \u201cSometimes, I play the breeze going through the trees or the sound of your voice complaining.\u201d And then that\u2019s what she did. You could hear what could be recognized as the sound of you wanting to goto McDonald\u2019s because your parents never let you go coming out of the black-and-white keys.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan I tell you a secret?\u201d your Mom-Mom asked. It was as always not really a question.<\/p>\n

She told you that when she was seventeen, all her best friends had been in the church choir but she had been cut. It was the first real disappointment of her life. And even though, you had been a little jealous of your grandma. You\u2019d gotten the idea that every person older than you had to have had a worse life than you. Racism, no good technology, bad food, everyone was dying all the time from weird sicknesses, only rich people got to eat fries. But, your parents had moved to a nice suburb and you went to nice schools, so you couldn\u2019t complain about things. And your grandma, she knew how hard things were for you. Even decades later, walking down the street with your headphones on, you rolled your eyes at the memory. Your Mom-Mom told you she felt so lonely and embarrassed that for weeks, all she thought about was how to have a talent. The rejection had set off a spiral of wondering if there was anything she was good at.<\/p>\n

Not especially kind, couldn\u2019t bake, could dance only in a group to blend into, was an okay driver, only decent at school, killed parts of the garden, and sometimes struggled to see the difference between some greens and blues. A boy had told her she kissed bad. Your Mom-Mom went out into the world and wasn\u2019t sure what she was going to do. Maybe, the idea was to sulk. Maybe, something else. You remember a hesitant look on her face. As an adult, you\u2019ve seen the own look on your face when you\u2019re thinking about all the things that can chew on your brain and self-respect.<\/p>\n

\u201cI met a man out in the fields,\u201d your Mom-Mom said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was taller than any man could ever be, his skin was soft green in the light, navy in half-darkness. His voice was kind and sweet. I\u2019ve never heard anyone sound like that. It made me trust him instantly.\u201d He took your Mom-Mom\u2019s hand and walked with her out in the high grass, listening to all her worries. Every single word was precious and she could tell he was taking everything she said seriously. The world filled with fireflies and rhododendron musk.<\/p>\n

He told her that every single person held some of the universe\u2019s song. People liked to pretend they were individuals, but every single one was a note on a fiddle. She loved that; you\u2019d heard her say those words so many times and it had made you think before this talk that there was a secret nest of poetry festering in her heart. She told you that man was God. He had held her head in her hands, breathed on her, and made her promise to always know his will was true. Her voice would be beautiful forever. Never age. All she had to give him was her promise, a performance or two.<\/p>\n

You were a child. And as an adult, you had cultivated the wisdom to let anyone who wanted to believe in something that didn\u2019t obviously hurt someone else. If a friend wanted to believe the power of her thoughts cured her from pneumonia not the antibiotics regimen, fine, as long as she didn\u2019t have kids or was a doctor. But you told your grandmother what was in your heart, that it sounded like a deal with the devil. You got your heart\u2019s desires without any work. You had someone mysterious tell you his will was true. And maybe this is how you learned that wisdom because despite you being a child, her eyes welled with tears. It was one of your life\u2019s big hurts that you could so casually do that to someone you loved so much.<\/p>\n

As you walked, you turned this story over in your head and kept thinking about the note your professor had written you. She had written: One day, when you get over the monsters and all<\/em> the ostentatious weirdness, you may write a book of real merit. You<\/em> need to learn how to talk about race in an honest way. <\/em>You had flipped the paper over to see if it was a joke or some computer error. There had to be more. But that was all she had given you.<\/p>\n

Then you went home and pulled the copy of her most famous novel off the shelf; you had bought it when you got into the program. The praise on the cover called it a tour de force of racial reckoning. \u201cA modern Nella Larsen!\u201d said an unnamed reviewer. A Black woman goes to Africa and appears to be annoyed that every Black person in Senegal and Tanzania and South Africa doesn\u2019t recognize her as some form of kin because she is light skinned. She sees every African kid\u2014poor kids in markets, rich kids in restaurants\u2014and thinks they could all have better lives with her in the United States but that is couched in the kaleidoscope of the main character\u2019s infertility and loneliness, so it feels like you\u2019re told not to judge. People were chocolate, cinnamon, wood, blue-black, obsidian. Everyone was mean but the woman in the book was coming off a bad breakup, so dear reader, give her a break. She was thirty-seven and the world felt so heavy and there was a line on her forehead that could be seen in very bright light. When she goes back to the US, alone and holding resentments toward everyone else in the entire world, there is an election happening. A white politician who had genuinely said Black Americans should go back to Africa won. The novel ended with the protagonist drinking a beer and wondering where in the world she could go next. Maybe Brazil.<\/p>\n

You felt like you had chugged an energy drink by the time you were done reading. There was something so rancid to you, so much of a performance of what literature should be, that you had to walk it off or feel forever cursed. So, you walked to the park, past that to the one across town. Few cars were on the road. The tires sounded like wishes muttered a sad man\u2019s breath. It was thrilling to care so much about literature. It was real loser shit to care so much about literature. The sidewalks became more cracked and uneven the further out of town you walked, then they disappeared, and it was only until you were on the edge of a long field that you realized how much your thoughts chomp chomping their way through your body had propelled you.<\/p>\n

In summer, a farmer\u2019s market was held in this field. You had gone once and someone had handed you a flyer about how corn was just as big of a contributor to global warming as cows. Corn fields sweating their way into sweetness could make the air hotter and more humid. You realized as you sat down to watch the night sky that you had never checked that fact. It seemed too silly to believe. Venus ascendant, sky blackened with the new moon, and acool breeze soothed you.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been waiting for you,\u201d a voice said. A man, too tall to be believed, his skin in the 4 a.m. gloom, navy. His hands were heavy with silver rings. There were faces and symbols carved into them.<\/p>\n

You were certain in a sudden heart pound that again, you had died. You tried to trace back what could have happened. Had you walked in front of a car? Had you harmed yourself? Had someone found you, a lone, distracted woman in the night and felt relieved that here was something easy to snatch and never missed? There was a time where you asked your therapist if you had Cotard\u2019s Syndrome and she\u2019d said, do you see yourself as a corpse? Do you believe truly that you are beyond harm? Oh, you\u2019d said lightly, every day hurts alittle.<\/p>\n

He told you to tell him everything weighing on you. You told him about a poem you had read five years ago about two lovers who fucked each other so good that one believed he was the sky and the other felt like he was the cloud inside the sky, heavy and filled with lightning, and that you would never write anything that would hurt someone so wonderfully as that poem hurt you. You told him that the only thing you truly loved was reading. Writing didn\u2019t even mean as much to you. He waited for you to ask about fame, to say wealth, universal acclaim. You told him about an interview you had read where a famous writer wrote about how the most meaningful thing to her were the early nights, before she became a capital-w Writer, where she sat at her desk and wrote only to please herself. He kept trying to hold your hand but you kept gesturing and talking. You told him that you had loved so many people but here, trying to write a book, this was your first great romance. He told you that if you gave him something, he could give you more than you might ever be able to consider wanting. You would only have to promise to give him something in return. I knew your grandmother, he said. You can trust me.<\/p>\n

His eyes were silver in that moment. It made you want to write a poem. You could see yourself at your desk trying to push the glint you saw against starlight against the metal of the small pocketknife you kept in your pocket because you lived alone and the nib of the nice fountain pen that was the last gift your grandmother had given you. She had never written songs or sang anywhere but in her kitchen and her church. Her voice always wonderful to you.<\/p>\n

I am thinking again what if I had said yes and taken his hand. Warm palm and smooth manicured nails and the hard metal of his rings holding onto mine for forever. He would have whispered an idea into my mouth that would have earned a million dollars and expensive shoes and a boring interview on TV to follow, and every day I would have known that it was never really mine. My parents might still own my childhood home, my father\u2019s garden still intact. In the bookstore, my old classmate and teacher have books in the front window. They are both about characters feeling things in front of the ocean, both are called \u201cmodern classics\u201d in large white print. I have my desk.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

Excerpted from\u00a0<\/em>BLACK ARTS <\/a>by Megan Giddings. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyrighted \u00a9 2026 by Megan Giddings.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After Lorrie Moore and Kiese Laymon. You chose this program based on money and because you never had a Black person of any gender teach you anything about writing or reading. You learned math and Black Studies and the safest<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":275679,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25508,3,43074,26765,43075],"tags":[18482,525,54760,188],"class_list":["post-275668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-fiction","category-excerpts","category-fictionandpoetry","category-short-stories","category-short-story","tag-amistad","tag-black-arts","tag-megan-giddings","tag-short-stories","story-type-daily-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Ig","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/black-arts.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276725,"date":"2026-09-08T04:01:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T08:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276725"},"modified":"2026-09-07T16:34:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T20:34:23","slug":"anna-silman-on-revisiting-the-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/anna-silman-on-revisiting-the-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Anna Silman on Revisiting the Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to season four of <\/em>The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview. This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer they’re looking for, what makes a good question, how do you listen for what’s unsaid, and how hard do you have to push someone before they say something new? <\/em><\/p>\n

Subscribe to <\/strong><\/em>The Critic and Her Publics<\/strong><\/a>, available wherever you get your podcasts!<\/strong><\/em>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n