I'm a freelance writer, based in New York City. I write fiction, reviews, and criticism. I also edit dispatches for The Common, a literary magazine based in Amherst, Massachusetts. You can find links to my recent publications on this site, as well as photographs and artwork. Email me at:
contact[at]hannahgersen[dot]com
THE novelist Alex Gilvarry was in the midst of a fashion emergency. Perusing the racks of Oak, a trendy boutique in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he looked for a sweater to cover up a mustard stain on his plaid shirt. In a few hours, he would speak to M.F.A. students at Hunter College, his alma mater, and he didn’t want to look like a slob.
(Continued at The New York Times)
A mid-century holiday card from my grandmother, featuring my dad, aunt, and uncle. And some really big mountains.
Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding would make the perfect graduation present. That’s not to imply that one will necessarily outgrow this novel, only that it is preoccupied with the sort of questions most of us first grapple with in early adulthood. What are my ambitions? Who are my friends? What counts as success? The charm of this novel is that it approaches these concerns as earnestly as its college-aged characters do, but without the same angst. To put it another way, The Art of Fielding lacks pretension. With its short sentences, short chapters, and simple themes, The Art of Fielding is a novel unafraid to use what one character describes as, “those big little words: love, work, art.”
(continued at Tottenville Review)
(Photo by Annie Leibovitz)
In 1977, Dorothy Hall went to a screening to watch her daughter, Diane Keaton, star in a new Woody Allen film, Annie Hall. She wrote about the experience in her journal:
I only saw Diane, her mannerisms, expressions, dress, hair, etc, the total her. The story took second place … She looked beautiful … She chose her own clothes … It seemed real. Annie’s camera in hand, her gum chewing, her lack of confidence; pure Diane.
Three decades later, Ms. Keaton recalls her first screening of Annie Hall:
(continued at The New York Observer)
My short story, “Our Bathsheba” is featured in the most recent issue of The Normal School, which just arrived on my doorstep and should be in bookstores, too!
If Jonathan Lethem had gotten his way, his new book, The Ecstasy of Influence (Doubleday, 464 pages, $27.95), would be subtitled “Advertisements for Norman Mailer.” Both titles are borrowed from other writers: The Ecstasy of Influence is a play on literary critic Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, while the subtitle is lifted from Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself. Mr. Lethem’s editor nixed the Mailer-inspired subtitle in favor of “Nonfictions, etc.,” which is more straightforward, but perhaps not as descriptive of this bursting-at-the-seams collection of essays, profiles, reviews, fictions and juvenilia. As its title suggests, the book explores Mr. Lethem’s many influences, literary and otherwise, but it does so in such a free-wheeling, frank and boisterous fashion that a nod to Mailer seems appropriate. At the very least, the collaged aspect of having one riffed-upon title jammed up against another would have hinted at the cut-and-paste extravaganza inside.
For Ploughshares:
There are no small epiphanies in Caitlin Horrocks’s short stories, only huge, life-changing decisions. In her debut collection, This Is Not Your City, her protagonists commit crimes, seduce strangers, and, in the disquieting title story, cover up an accidental death. These stories take place in a variety of settings, from a small lake town in Michigan to a ship on the Baltic Sea, and often provide glimpses into little-seen communities and subcultures. “It Looks Like This” is set partially in Amish country, while “Steal Small” explores the lives of dog poachers in Missouri. In the collection’s final, heart-breaking story, “In the Gulf of Aden, Past the Cape of Guardafui,” Horrocks places her characters on a cruise ship, where she somehow manages to balance a plot concerning a pirate raid with a sensitive portrait of the parents of a mentally incapacitated child. (continued…)
Back from Stockholm…
For The Millions:
After a couple days of hemming and hawing, I decided to join the protesters of Occupy Wall Street. I was hesitant to go because until very recently, I worked as an administrative assistant at a prominent Wall Street law firm. I didn’t know how, in good conscience, I could rail against The Man when my primary responsibility had once been to keep track of incoming phone calls from Goldman Sachs. But then I heard one of the protest’s organizers on the radio saying that the Occupy movement wasn’t against capitalism, corporations, or even big banking. He was for income equality. And democracy. The reporter pressed him to be more specific, but he refused.
“Why do they have to be more specific?” I yelled at the radio. “Isn’t it obvious why they’re upset?”
monti graffiti on Flickr.
Found this in a 1943 “Pocket Book of Science Fiction.”
Sunrise on Flickr.
My review of Lost Memory of Skin, by Russell Banks, for The New York Observer
Upon returning from vacation I was very excited to receive the most recent of The Chattahoochee Review, which features my short story, “Brood X.”
