Hi, I'm Becca. I am the non-fiction book critic of the Washington Post, an editor at The Point, and a contributing editor at The Boston Review . My essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, will be by Metropolitan Books in the US and Virago in the UK this April. You can pre-order it here. Finally, I am also a PhD candidate (on indefinite hiatus) in philosophy at Harvard, but i remain perhaps delusionally convinced that someday I will finish my dissertation. These days I live in Washington, DC, with this person, whom I love. Here you can find all of my Washington Post pieces, which will come out each week, generally speaking.
To keep up with my writing/rantings, subscribe to my substack here. As a writer: I have contributed essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review to publications like The TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Liberties, Bookforum, Art in America, The Yale Review, The Baffler, and more. These days, I write mostly for the Washington Post about non-fiction, but occasionally I write essays on fiction and whatever else for other venues. I am the winner of the first annual Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism (see more here) and the 2023 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing (see more here). In 2017, I was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the essays/criticism category. A few authors I especially love are Joseph Roth, Italo Svevo, Henry James, Henry Green, Heinrich von Kleist, Marie de France, and Norman Rush. My agent is Anna Sproul-Latimer of Neon Literary. As a (lapsed?) philosopher: I am primarily interested in aesthetics (especially aesthetic value and its relationship to other types of value), the philosophy of love and sex, and the history of German philosophy, especially Martin Heidegger, although I have increasingly consuming secondary interests in political philosophy. In "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," published in The British Journal of Aesthetics, I defend aestheticism, the view that aesthetic value is sometimes a partial grounds of moral value. I describe aestheticism in more detail in a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art. If I ever get around to completing it, my dissertation will be about some combination of the following: what it is to be a beautiful person, why evolutionary psychologists are wrong about human beauty, the ethics of exclusionary romantic/sexual/aesthetic preferences, and what role the state should play in ameliorating inequitable distributions of intimate "goods." I hold a first-class MPhil in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge and a B.A., summa cum laude with high honors, from Dartmouth College, where I studied philosophy & German (and cultivated an enduring distaste for fraternities). I receive many emails asking for advice about graduate school applications. I have answered some frequently asked questions on this page. As I note there, I do not consider myself an expert in how to write a successful graduate school application, and I urge all prospective grad students to consult resources online, as well as supervisors who have served on admissions committees, rather than me! Before the pandemic, I followed Hegel in regarding nature as geistlos, but now, like any good Heideggerian, I am a big fan of hiking. Here I am in the Berkshires, which I love
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...on the centennial of her birth.
"When I first read Iris Murdoch, I was feeling disastrously American at the University of Cambridge. Murdoch’s fiction was proof that English intellectuals did have turbulent emotional lives, however unruffled they appeared at formal halls. Murdoch not only salvaged my year abroad: she also helped me to perceive a connection between the moral and the aesthetic that I had yet to discern. The quality of any piece of writing (fictional or otherwise) is in large part question of its sensitivity to other people’s experience of the world. Thus any would-be writer has aesthetic – in addition to ethical – reason to practise empathy." Read the rest (and other TLS contributors' contributions) here.
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What was it like in the lost lands of Rezzori’s youth? Mostly, it seems, it was light there. In Rezzori’s loosely autobiographical novel An Ermine in Czernopol (1958), his narrator eulogizes a childhood in which “everything seemed sharper, brighter, and more intense.” In The Snows of Yesteryear, Rezzori announces that “with the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, a light was extinguished that until then had bathed the days in a golden sheen.” And in Abel and Cain, a nearly nine-hundred-page colossus out from New York Review Books this spring, another wistful Pan-European reports that his first memories are full of “light falling obliquely through a large window, slanting across a bright room.”
Even the spring of 1938, when Hitler marched into Vienna, was eerily luminous. The early days of Nazism were blessed with “Hitler weather,” “an icy cold blue sky and a Sunday glow.” Is the harsh glint of “Hitler weather” part of what Rezzori, in the guise of his narrators, misses? He never says as much. But after all his talk of glitter and glow, I can’t help but wonder. Read more here. The novel is a durable form, no matter how many time its death has been declared,” writes Lorentzen. The novel is not dead—not even moribund—because novels have only ever seriously interested a small but fiercely interested (and fiercely quarrelsome) group of marginal weirdos. Their survival does not depend on their capacity to command a mass audience but rather on their capacity to captivate cachectic devotees. Criticism, too, is a durable form. Its best practitioners, perverse lovers of hating, have always constituted an embittered, embattled minority. And aren’t we at least lucky to live at a time when there’s so much to loathe? Read the whole thing (and my co-contributers' contributions) here.
The poststructural thinkers who pronounced the author dead did not think to mourn. They regarded the author’s demise as a liberating development – one that freed the reader from the strict constraints of biographical interpretation. The feminist critic Nancy K. Miller claimed, however, that reports of the author’s death had been greatly exaggerated. In her seminal essay “The Text’s Heroine” (1982), she argued that it is necessary to “continue to work for the woman who has been writing”: “not to do so will reauthorize our oblivion”. If the “dead” author is irrelevant to the work, then by extension so is their gender. Miller was one of the first to point out that this approach too easily suggests that identity – and whatever material constraints attend it – has no bearing on opportunity or output. Read more here.
In his 1881 masterpiece, Epitaph of a Small Winner, the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis instructs his readers to memorize the phrase “the voluptuousness of misery.” “Study it from time to time, and, if you do not succeed in understanding it, you may conclude that you have missed one of the most subtle emotions of which man is capable,” he warns. You will also have missed the key to Machado’s sly stories, which make for marvelous miseries. Read more here.
The truth is that college-aged men who date women in high school, to say nothing of middle-aged men who date women in their early twenties, to say nothing of men who makes passes at the captive audience of their employees, are losers. They live in predictable rooms and write predictable books. They even smoke predictable cigarettes. Men like that don’t even have the minor merit of originality. Read more here.
Hannah Arendt was obsessed with the dangers of thoughtlessness. Nine years after her controversial report on the Adolf Eichmann trial of 1961 appeared in the New Yorker, she was still fascinated by the man’s conspicuous glibness – and still convinced that lazy habits of speech and mind gave rise to evil-doing. As she remarked in her lecture “Thinking and Moral Considerations” (1970), “the only specific characteristic one could detect” in Eichmann was “a curious, quite authentic inability to think”. Her conclusion was that critical engagement is not just intellectually but also ethically imperative.
How would Arendt feel, then, about the facile lionization she faces in The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, a graphic novel-cum- biography by the cartoonist Ken Krimstein? Read more here or in print. "The titles of certain books are like names of cities in which we used to live for a time,” Ortega y Gasset once wrote. “They at once bring back a climate, a peculiar smell of streets, a general type of people and a specific rhythm of life.” Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries is a book to live in: two volumes and more than 1,700 pages of roomy universe, robustly imagined and richly populated... More here or in print.
If anyone is entitled to misgivings about the pernicious world of publishing, it’s Helen DeWitt, the long-suffering veteran of a by-now-well-known bevy of artistic successes and commercial failures. The Last Samurai, an exuberantly experimental novel about a child prodigy and his brilliant but depressive mother, made a triumphant debut at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1999, but its publication was fraught. DeWitt fought to retain her idiosyncratic typesetting, faced off with a belligerent copy editor, and saw few profits in the wake of financial disputes with her publisher. Worse still, the imprint responsible for The Last Samurai folded in 2005. Though the book commanded a dedicated cult following, it went out of print until New Directions reissued it 11 years later. Read more here or in print.
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