Myra Bloom

Miriam Toews’s eighth novel, Fight Night, takes the form of a long letter penned by nine-year-old Swiv to her absent father — whose whereabouts and motivations for leaving are, at least to her, mysterious. Swiv has been expelled for fighting and now spends her days in the school of life presided over by her…

There’s a certain ­phenomenon I’ve experienced a lot lately in one-on-one encounters with fellow left-­identified academics. One of us brings up whatever idea or cultural artifact is currently being championed in the zeitgeist and asks, tentatively, “So, what do you think of it?” The other’s shoulders hunch reflexively, eyes darting around the room with a mixture of fear and…

In the opening lines of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—arguably one of the most famous incipits of all time—the narrator, Humbert Humbert, engulfs the object of his desire in a linguistic caress: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to…

In September 2007, Nelly Arcan appeared on the talk show Tout le monde en parle, a cultural phenomenon in Quebec watched weekly by more than a million viewers. Her first two novels, Whore and Hysteric, had scorched the literary landscape with their caustic, quasi-autobiographical reflections on sex…