Non-fiction

Institutions perpetuate themselves and, being geared towards their own reproduction, they make it so that the incentives to complain are few, especially for those of us who want a future in the academy.

The First Time I Thought I Was Dying is at its most engaging when Walker lets her specific experiences raise larger, ethically knotty questions and resists the urge to answer them too neatly.

Haydar links her personal tragedy to the myriad ways in which misogyny, patriarchy and racism hurt and harm, creating power dynamics within families that allow abuse to flourish.

In this debate over the present understanding of sovereignty, history can broaden our perspective, revealing that the present and the possible are not coterminous; the past alive with ideas we may never have considered, or dismissed summarily as implausible.

Can’t Get You Out of My Head combines a novelistic structure with an essayistic style to create an oblique mode of visual storytelling, uniquely suited to the pause-and-repeat mode of web viewing.

In a sense, the narrator of He plays the role of tour guide through Murray Bail’s memories, addressing his subject’s life retrospectively while exhibiting a more intimate, but not total, knowledge of his thoughts and experiences.

Didion’s specific genius, once again on display in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, is that she orders her prose with such painstaking precision that one cannot help but glimpse the disorder roiling just beneath.

There are few experiences lonelier than being with people who don’t understand or like you; conversely, it’s quite possible to be physically alone and yet feel deeply connected to the world.

If we take seriously the idea that our personhood in some way inhabits cyberspace, what should we do with the digital remains we leave behind?

These figures in Into the Loneliness are imbued with pathos and pity of a more particular, feminine frailty, no doubt more realistic. But this may be the strange effect of a woman biographing women subjects.