Essays
Spring 2025, Omnium Gatherum Quarterly
It was the summer of 2000. I was the woman whose husband dashed in between workshops bearing a bundle in a blue sling, so I could nurse our month-old infant. What joy that week held, to be part of so much procreative energy in this community of writers in the Sierra Nevada. I had finished my MFA the year before. All of us dreamed of the day when our work, like the work of our mentors and teachers, would be published.
April 25, 2020, The Economist
Readers across the world are finding solace in “War and Peace”
Over the past 15 years Yiyun Li, a Chinese-American author, has read “War and Peace” at least a dozen times. Her hardback copy of Leo Tolstoy’s 1,200-page saga bristles with coloured notes, like some exotic lizard’s spine. The novel is not just a masterclass in fiction, Ms Li believes, but a remedy for distress. At the most difficult times in her life, she says, she has turned to it again and again, reassured by its “solidity” in the face of uncertainty.
August 29, 2015, The Economist
Ties that Bind: Elena Ferrante
Novels become literary blockbusters for many reasons. Some are created by mountains of marketing cash, some by media saturation. “Fifty Shades of Grey” and Harper Lee’s long-lost work, “Go Set a Watchman”, both fit this mould. Others are fuelled by something quite different, and their success is impossible to predict. In recent years “The Neapolitan Novels”, four volumes by an anonymous Italian author calling herself Elena Ferrante, have become a fictional juggernaut that not even the author’s English-language publishers, Europa Editions, saw coming.
December 14, 2014
The Gift of Apprenticeship: In printing, novel-writing and life
I remember with searing clarity the day I printed a thousand envelopes with the wrong zip code in Yolla Bolly red. It was my trial week in a fine letterpress shop in a remote California valley. The master printer bellowed, and I cried. I had hoped to become the Yolla Bolly Press’s first apprentice, but for a while it looked like I would be the last.
September 24, 2006, The Washington Post
She was, and still is, a nobody. He is Germany’s most famous writer. But Margarete Barthel and Guenter Grass share a great deal in common.
November 24, 2010, More Intelligent Life
We Ten Million
Somewhere in the world right now, ten million souls are hunched over their keyboards writing novels. Ten million hopeful scribblers in their holes. Good Lord, I’m one of them.
Alix Christie 