Lewis Hyde photo: Ruben Cox.

Gifts pass from hand to hand: they endure through such transmission, as every time a gift is given it is enlivened and regenerated through the new spiritual life it engenders both in the giver and in the receiver.

And so it is with Lewis Hyde’s classic study of gift giving and its relationship to art. The Gift has never been out of print; it moves like an underground current among artists of all kinds, through word of mouth and bestowal. It is the one book I recommend without fail to aspiring writers and painters and musicians, for it is not a how-to book—there are many of these—but a book about the core nature of what it is that artists do, and also about the relation of these activities to our overwhelmingly commercial society. If you want to write, paint, sing, compose, act, or make films, read The Gift. It will help to keep you sane.

I doubt that Lewis Hyde knew while he was writing it that he was composing such an essential work. Perhaps he felt he was merely exploring a subject of interest to him—in its short form, why poets in our society are seldom rich—and enjoying the many tributaries he was uncovering through his exploration without realizing that he had hit on a wellspring. When asked by his original editor who his presumed audience was, he couldn’t really pinpoint it but settled for “poets.” “That’s not what most editors want to hear,” as he says in his preface to the 2007 edition. “Many prefer ‘dog owners seeking news of the dead.’ ” As he then tells us, “The happy fact is that The Gift has managed to find an audience beyond the community of poets.” This is an understatement of some vastness.

I first encountered both Lewis Hyde and The Gift in the summer of 1984. I was in the midst of writing The Handmaid’s Tale, begun in the spring in that combination of besieged city and consumer showcase that was West Berlin at the time and where the twentieth-century clash between communitarianism gone wrong and Mammon worship gone wild was most starkly in evidence. But now it was July, and I was in Port Townsend, Washington, at a summer school for writers of the kind that were then multiplying. In that secluded area, all was bucolic. Read More

Diane Williams’s story “Garden Magic” appears in our Fall 2019 issue. We asked her to give us a tour of the objects in her office.

The artworks in the room where I write inhabit my fiction everywhere, and those of them that are not explicitly conjured nevertheless recommend themselves to me daily.

If I look to the right, while sitting in my chair, I follow the travels of Ebenezer Wright’s jerry-rigged adventurer with whom I readily identify.

He is a vintage toy clown, riding a scooter, coasting on a roadway—wholly dependent, it seems, on a wing butterfly screw.

His destination is a formidable one and he is so eager—he’s on tiptoe. For if he keeps faith with the gray-shaded, curving pathway that he began the journey on, he’ll soon arrive at the Great Sphinx—situated only inches above him. Read More

One evening in Rome, in the kitchen of the Italian writer Caterina Bonvicini, I expressed a desire to assemble a collection of Italian short stories translated into English. It was March of 2016, during a brief trip back to Italy. Six months before, my family and I had returned to the United States after living for three years in Rome.

My life as a reader had, by that time, taken an unexpected turn; since 2012, shortly before moving to Rome, I had chosen to read only Italian literature, mostly from the twentieth century, and to read those works exclusively in Italian, a language I had diligently studied for many years but had yet to master. I was forty-five years old, and I believed, even before this new phase began, that I was already fully formed as a reader and writer. And yet I surrendered to an inexplicable urge to distance myself, to immerse myself, and to acquire a second literary formation.

It was one thing to read only Italian when living in Italy, where the winds were favorable, where my state of voluntary literary exile made sense. I read with an adolescent’s zeal, transported to another dimension, standing before a new group of gods. I had an Italian teacher who came to my home twice a week and, at the start, brought me chapters and excerpts equipped with footnotes for elementary readers. I befriended Italians who mentioned authors I had never heard of before. I began frequenting bookstores, especially those that sold secondhand volumes, combing the shelves for their works. I purchased them and read them, and copied down sentences by hand, taping them over my desk for inspiration. I realized that, for the first time in decades, I was reading to satisfy only myself. I was no longer influenced by the expectations and broader cultural consensus that dictate what one should be reading—such frames of reference had fallen away. The more people remarked on my new inclination—But don’t you miss English?—the more I clung to my newfound freedom, not wanting it to end. Read More

In her Art of Fiction interview in our new Fall issue, Alice McDermott reveals that she is currently at work on a very short novel. The format has long intrigued her, and she has taught a class on the subject to her M.F.A. students at Johns Hopkins University. “I divide the reading list into three loose categories: A Day in the Life, An Inciting Incident, and A Life. We read three novels in each category, and then the students begin their own short novels, using these somewhat fungible categories as structural guides,” she says. “The wonderful thing about teaching the short novel is that structure is everything, and often more apparent than in a long and winding five-hundred-pager.” We asked her to share a few of her favorite short novels below.

A Day in the Life

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

This is a novel that careens to a foregone conclusion (page 2: “Today he was afraid. He was aware that his routine was about to break up and he sensed that a huge trouble long presaged but til now formless was due”) without ever losing its protagonist’s—the slovenly, whiny, disappointed, exhausted, endearing Tommy Wilhelm’s—own desperate, caffeinated, ever-flickering sense of hope. It’s all in the language: hardly a sentence in this novel, hardly a detail, that does not, wryly, keenly, make your heart ache.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A novel that proves plodding doesn’t have to be a pejorative. Ivan Denisovich Shukov’s icy plod through this long, cold, routine day in a Siberian labor camp magnifies an excruciating drama: the struggle to find food, to work, to stay out of trouble, to stay human in the most inhuman of circumstances. Less celebrated than it once was, this novel is more than a historical artifact or political tract, it’s a chilling (literally) work of art.

Read More

Major Jackson photo: © Erin Patrice O’Brien.

Does American poetry suffer from an abundance of artistic dignity and not enough street credibility? It’s possible. When I asked a friend, a terrific prose writer, why she seems to have a slight disdain for poetry, she replied, “It’s too elitist, like walking through a beautiful forest in which I know not where to look, much less know what I am searching for. If I don’t get it as a reader, then I feel like an idiot and somehow not worthy of the form.” In years past, I would have fretted and dismissed her remarks as garden-variety philistinism, but my friend is admirably sensitive, a brilliant scholar, Ivy educated, and not someone prone to make trivializing remarks without great consideration.

Nor is she alone. For the better part of my life, at dinner parties, at neighborhood gatherings, or on the sidelines of my children’s sporting events, I have had to confront the incredulity of ordinarily thoughtful, even erudite people who professed a similar antagonism toward poetry. An English department chair, a Renaissance scholar relishing a moment of candor, with tapenade and a flute of Dom Ruinart in hand, admitted to me that he is “terrified” of poetry. The roots of such fears and anxieties have been the subject of many essays, and as a result there are as many defenses as there are quarrels with poetry, the most recent being Ben Lerner’s humorous and insolently titled The Hatred of Poetry. Read More

On rereading Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and confronting the trauma of sexual assault.

The morning after I was raped, nearly eight years ago, I got in my car and drove home. There, in my teenage bedroom, I took the pair of tights I’d been wearing the night before out of my bag, put them back on, and looked at myself in the mirror. The tights were torn across the crotch: not a ladder, but a gaping, deliberate tear that went across both thighs and between my legs. At the tops of my legs, on the skin exposed by the tear, were bruises. I took the tights off and threw them away, along with the underwear I had been wearing that night. I was due to start my first year of college in a week, and my mind was pushing down the memories of what had happened the night before. Even then, I was already rationalizing the tears and the bruises as something consensual, something I had either invited or agreed to.

The mind has ways of burying what has happened to the body, during and after trauma. If this has not happened to you, it can be difficult to comprehend. Dissociative amnesia is a survival mechanism which represses memories and experiences of trauma so deeply that the conscious mind has no access to it. Throughout my time at university, I dissociated myself from the memory of what had happened just before I moved away from home. I experienced anxiety and depression, developed disordered eating habits and addictive behavior. I had nightmares, dreams of a man standing over me, from which I would wake up screaming so loudly that I would wake my neighbors, but all of this I somehow managed to put down to exam stress, work stress—anything that would allow me to continue denying the fact that I had been raped.

It was not until a year after graduating, more than four years after the assault, that I first acknowledged what had happened to me. Whether it was emotional stability, maturity, or forcible reminders, my mind was ready to present me with those buried memories. And when they came, they came with force. I was suffering daily panic attacks, flashbacks, intense anxiety, and depression. I began treatment, medication courses, therapy, and the soul-destroying work of telling the people I loved most what I had spent all these years hiding. Of the various coping mechanisms I developed, functional and dysfunctional, the one I held on to, the one that gave me the most hope, was writing. It gave me the possibility of a future that wasn’t shaped by trauma, but that I might shape. When I first started showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress, it was November 2015. By the end of the year, I had written the short story—a rape, its consequences—on which my first novel would be based. Read More