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Night has fallen by the time we reach the service station, and there’s a line for the pumps. It’s a Friday in the busy season, and amid the noise of car doors opening and closing, people talking and shouting, my parents do what they can to keep me from waking. Very slowly, Mom moves out from under …

My father’s beliefs were so rigid that once, when my parents came to visit me at Barnard, I suggested we walk down Fifth Avenue to look at the shopwindows and he refused. He was almost viscerally offended by the idea of frivolously spending money, and of accumulating wealth. To this day, almost eve…

There were a lot of people there. Cool, distinguished, at the top of their cool, distinguished fields. I was very intimidated. My clothes were far too formal. I kept being introduced to people and nodding sagely as they spoke their names then forgetting what they’d said five seconds later. To douse…

Months later, I emailed her to ask her why she had said this. I asked what had made her so certain of her opinion. She didn’t answer. I emailed her again, and once again got no answer. I am embarrassed to say how terrible I felt about this; the combination of what had felt like profound care on the…

Pleasure is why we read literature, but the pleasures literature delivers are complex and not easily described, defined, or fixed in time and place. As Guillory writes, the pleasures of literature are often only gained at the expense of pains: the initial pain of learning to read, the pain of under…