Bible Study in the Basement

Namara Smith: ‘Priestdaddy: A Memoir’, 13 July 2017

Priestdaddy: A Memoir 
by Patricia Lockwood.
Allen Lane, 333 pp., £14.99, May 2017, 978 1 84614 920 7
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... material and who had the right to joke about such things was debated on the internet for months. Patricia Lockwood’s contribution to this debate, perhaps the only poem (so far) inspired by a social media controversy, was published in the online magazine the Awl in 2013. At the time, Lockwood, whose first poetry ...

On Hera Lindsay Bird

Stephanie Burt: Hera Lindsay Bird, 30 November 2017

... it’s a hit in New Zealand – a difference between Bird and most of her American parallels (Patricia Lockwood excepted). Young Americans can write, if they wish, for readers of their own cohort and their own tastes, in Brooklyn and Oakland, for the coolest few thousand among America’s 323 million. Though her poems circulate online, though her ...

Glimpses of Utopia

Joanna Biggs: Sally Rooney’s Couples, 26 September 2024

Intermezzo 
by Sally Rooney.
Faber, 448 pp., £20, September, 978 0 571 36546 3
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... weakness in her writing is the sentences. ‘I don’t think my prose is fantastic,’ she told Patricia Lockwood in an interview two years ago – I felt this when I started taking notes on Intermezzo, but hadn’t thought much about it before. As I lay in the sun reading galleys dog-eared by three colleagues before me, the point of a Sally Rooney ...

What you can get away with

James Wolcott: Updike Reconsidered, 19 February 2026

John Updike: A Life in Letters 
by John Updike, edited by James Schiff.
Hamish Hamilton, 874 pp., £40, November 2025, 978 0 241 70758 6
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... His stature as a literary artist precariously balances on a Woman Problem that was zeroed in on by Patricia Lockwood in the LRB (10 October 2019), piloting the Millennium Falcon through the corpus. Literary legacy in our scrappy century is harder to maintain if you lose female readers, and the letters aren’t likely to stem the migration or win over ...

No Shortage of Cousins

David Trotter: Bowenology, 12 August 2021

Selected Stories 
by Elizabeth Bowen, edited by Tessa Hadley.
Vintage, 320 pp., £14.99, April 2021, 978 1 78487 715 6
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The Hotel 
by Elizabeth Bowen.
Anchor, 256 pp., $16, August 2020, 978 0 593 08065 8
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Friends and Relations 
by Elizabeth Bowen.
Anchor, 224 pp., $16, August 2020, 978 0 593 08067 2
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... used to tell me to do.”’ Add some internet, and we arrive at the startling first sentence of Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This. ‘She opened the portal, and the mind met her more than halfway.’In both novels, crisis takes the form of a trick played by nature on culture. Lockwood’s unnamed ...