The tough mind of Paula Fox
“There is a particular sort of toughness of mind to be found in American women writers — Flannery O’Connor and Dawn Powell had it — and its finest living avatar is now clearly Paula Fox.” — Gerald Howard, 2001
“There is a particular sort of toughness of mind to be found in American women writers — Flannery O’Connor and Dawn Powell had it — and its finest living avatar is now clearly Paula Fox.” — Gerald Howard, 2001
“I used to want to be like June Miller when I was a teenager, because she sounded so beautiful and so seductive and so dangerous… I wanted to be like someone who never wrote anything.”
Mark Armstrong of Longreads posts his top essays and articles over at Mother Jones each week, and this time around I’m his “Featured Longreader.” Here’s some of what I’ve been reading recently: A Disney trip with kids meets lots of furtive weed smoking in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Rough Guide to Disney World. “It was a double hallucination,” he says. “You . . .
My friend Kate Christensen, whose work I knew and loved before I knew and loved her, closes out the second season of Girls Write Now’s Chapters with a reading from her new novel, The Astral, possibly my favorite of her books so far. I invited her to read because her work is funny, candid, and uncannily perceptive, both vulnerable and . . .