When Olivia Laing’s third book, The Lonely City, appeared in 2016, she was hailed as one of the leading contemporary nonfiction writers in the U.S. and the UK. After a breakup in her midthirties, she’d moved from London to New York. Adrift in …

  I read the manuscript of Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering last summer in Winnipeg, Canada, when I was going to several twelve-step meetings a week. I knew and admired Jamison’s 2014 breakthrough essay collection, The Empathy Exams; her abilit…

  Kathy Acker was the most intentional of writers, but paradoxically, while Blood and Guts propelled her mid-1980s commercial breakthrough, it was her least intended work. She composed Blood and Guts in fragments, in her notebooks and as drawings,…

Chris Kraus remembers the late writer, in life and in death.  Like everything in the past, everyone remembers it differently, and some of the people involved hardly remember at all. We’re talking about something that happened more than seventeen…

Chris Kraus reflects on Mary McCarthy’s reading, in November 1963, from her novel ‘The Group.’