“The narrator has spent most of her life in other people’s shadows, but through her storytelling asserts an identity that’s no longer tethered to another, one released only by disgrace.”
Patrick Ryan on the pitfalls of penning a period piece, the interesting part of writing villains, and the joys and anxieties of editing Alice Munro and Joy Williams
“This collection, as a whole, is not about the Space Age, per se. Still, that place and time exquisitely inflect each story.”
“The fetishization of Devon’s body reveals the uncanniness of the ‘normal’ teenage body, held up as the ideal of beauty and desirability though it is, in a sense, incomplete”: Mary Stewart Atwell reviews Megan Abbott’s latest novel.
“Grace Paley shows us one way in which the heretofore old-fashioned, third-person omniscient perspective might be one of contemporary fiction writers’ greatest tools to elicit empathy for characters.”
The Bright Side
“Any adult who has spent significant time with young people knows these feelings—the loss of a childhood self, the urge to save a teenager from your own mistakes. We Show What We Have Learned is full of these moments of doubling and their accompanying ache.”
“A Lesson in Point of View”
“Like many pre-pubescent Catholic girls in the early 1960s, I thought I had a ‘vocation,’ a calling to sisterhood. Well, I did, but it was sisterhood is power—feminism not the nunnery.”
