LIESL SCHILLINGER: ARTICLES AND FUGUES

Article on the electrifying Inaugural poem performance (The Hill We Climb) by Amanda Gorman; and how the young poet got to that stage--and where she is headed. In the Guardian.

My dynamic theory of how strongmen (magnets) and social media (megaphones) worked together to create the Jan. 6 Insurrection, and how they will continue to work, extending the reach of Trumpism and anti-democratic energies in the post-Trump era. Lit Hub, Jan. 7, 2021

Review of an expansive, revealing new biography of the children’s author (”Harriet the Spy”) Louise Fitzhugh, written by Leslie Brody. Before she wrote the bestselling children’s books that made her name, Fitzhugh was a wilful, contrarian, lesbian artist, who’d left behind her privileged family in Memphis to lead a self-defined creative life in Greenwich Village. In life, she avoided media spotlight and kept her secrets. This book brings her into the light.  

Essay mulling shared attributes of Napoleon and Trump; considering Napoleon’s enduring fame even after exile; and anticipating the endurance of Trump’s cult following after the presidency . Lit Hub.

Essay for the STAToREC pandemic issue--on drawing on plague strategies of the literary past, and the superstructures of the present to find a path forward, through and beyond the pandemic. One of 31 essays by writers on their experiences during the COVID-19 crisis. Collected in Nov 2020 in the book “Writing the Virus,” (from Outpost19); named a “New&Noteworthy” book by the New York Times in January 2021.

On the Mirror Stage that the pandemic has forced upon hundreds of millions of people, who rely on Zoom, FaceTime and other screen meetups to face the world outside their homes. Lit Hub. June 2020

Story about Ignaz Semmelweis, the prescient doctor who discovered before anyone else the lifesaving value of handwashing hygiene to save lives--and was vilified and ostracized by his peers for his discovery. Lit Hub, March 2020.

My essay, in Lit Hub, on what Camus knew about plagues, which we are learning in real time under the Coronavirus pandemic: the emotional and social fallout of a crisis of this scale, the sense of isolation and abandonment: "Each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky."

My May 19, 2019 op-ed about the lost opportunity of the Mueller Report, in the Washington Post.

My September 2020 Washington Post essay about the assault on the American Ideal advanced by Trump through his anti-immigrant policies. Prompted by Trump henchman Ken Cuccinelli's punitive recasting of Emma Lazarus’s classic poem (put to music by the composer of “God Bless America,” the immigrant Irving Berlin) “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor.”

My essay about politics and power, and why tyrants hate comedians...and satire. As Arthur Koestler knew...In New York Review of Books, April 2019.

Q&A with Jane Ciabattari for BOOKMARKS about five politically relevant novels in translation that I love.

Q&A in Asymptote about translating Cagnati, and about the origins of my neologisms book “Wordbirds.”

Essay -my introduction to my NYRB translation of Inès Cagnati’s 1973 novel “Free Day” (Jour de Congé), about the power of telling the stories of people who are too oppressed or overlooked to tell them for themselves.

Oct. 8, 2019. My review of a biography of the irrepressible children’s author and Fabian Society co-founder E. Nesbit, by Eleanor Fitzsimons, in the New York Times Book Review.

Essay and review in “Air Mail” , Jan 2020, of Adam Nicolson’s joint biography of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the fateful year that threw the two poets together (they were in their 20s) in the wake of the French Revolution. In the Quantocks, Britain’s  rugged, woodsy, lake and steepy-hill-filled region, the men, along with Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, wandered, talked, theorized, wrote, roistered, and invented a poetry that would honor the common man. The result? Their collaboration: Lyrical Ballads.

Review of a new biography, by Cate Haste, on the racy, intellectual jewel of Vienna, Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, writer of Lieder, lover of the leading creative geniuses of Europe in the first half of the 20th century (including the painter Kokoschka), and beyond.