Leslie Jamison

1 month ago | aaronrenn.com | Deborah Levy |Déborah Levy |Maggie Smith |Leslie Jamison |Jenny Offil

What I’ve been reading: Bring It Out: How to Cultivate the Unique Gifts and Assignments You've Been Given by Ben Pilgreen and Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life by David Bahnsen. In case you missed it, check out this long and substantial profile of me in the New York Times. It was an NYT “great read,” which is essentially their article of the day. It also got featured in the Politico Playbook.

1 month ago | offassignment.com | Leslie Jamison

Where my grandmother gave me bridge lessons and kept Sunkist fruit gems in her porcelain candy bowl. Where I did not give my pet cactus enough water. Where we shot our BB gun at the lemon tree in the backyard. Where I wore my Redskins 1994 NFL Champions T-shirt so many times it got holes. Where my older brother slept on the empty bottom bunk when I could not fall asleep. Where I had a comforter with black and white roses, and every single Nancy Drew. Where the dial-up modem crinkled into AOL.

1 month ago | vulture.com | Lyz Lenz |Leslie Jamison |Sarah Manguso |Scaachi Koul

cheat sheet Everyone’s writing about the end of their marriage, for better or worse. Divorce writing may be the toughest thing a memoirist can do other than covering a war,” writes Mary Karr in The Art of Memoir. Yet the divorce memoir — and its shy cousin, the autofictional divorce novel — has experienced a resurgence over the past couple of years with works that range from poetic to empowering to startlingly bitter about the whole institution of marriage.

1 month ago | bombmagazine.org | Eliza Barry Callahan |Leslie Jamison |Maggie Nelson

Eliza Barry Callahan's debut novel, The Hearing Test (Catapult, 2025), begins with a drone in her right ear, diagnosed as sudden deafness, that becomes a volatile score, an episode of life seen from an inaudible place outside one’s life, and a white noise exploration of consciousness and time-travel through the partly blanked-out layers of a self. I read the book in a single sitting, then read it again, and then again. I thought of Alice in Wonderland with its soundtrack whited out.

1 month ago | theparisreview.org | Leslie Jamison

By Leslie Jamison March 3, 2025 What secret desires and resentments are tucked inside the people we love? A little girl’s diary, with its tiny lock and key, testifies to the impulse to keep parts of ourselves hidden, but it’s impossible to look at a locked diary without imagining breaking it open. What to do then, with the published diary?