Articles

  • 2 weeks ago | ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler

    Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. It’s always the celebrities—the nouns and verbs and adjective—that get all the glory. But ever since I read The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir and her insight that it’s “and” that points to the truth, I’ve paid attention to it philosophically. Life and death; beauty and ugliness; joy and sorrow; mind and body. One does not preclude the other because life is far more complex and messy with opposites happening simultaneously.

  • 2 weeks ago | ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler

    This month, Holly Payne, who writes the substack Power of Page One, and I dove into the arresting first pages of Claire Oshetsky’s stunning debut novel, Chouette (2021)—a PEN/Faulkner Award longliste…

  • 3 weeks ago | ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler

    After Pearl dies, her daughter, Ada, inherits her house. Ada and her daughter, Pepper, move in and become increasingly entangled with the landscape and Pearl’s ghost or maybe her spirit or maybe Pearl herself. “Scenes are pinned to the pages by Wood’s extraordinary writing,” writes Andrew Sean Greer writes for The New York Times, “the finest language and imagery I’ve come across in a very long time. Precise, unindulgent, fresh and honest, every page is a celebration.” True, true.

  • 4 weeks ago | ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler

    Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. In this short story, the narrator explains how to write a true war story but within this expository structure, there’s a recurring story about the Vietnam war and the death of Curt Lemon. Every image has a built-in paradox, writes Catherine Brady in Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction. An image focuses the reader’s attention in a highly specific way and also generates a profusion of implications and associations.

  • 1 month ago | ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler

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