Jess Row
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Articles by Jess Row
To Write As If No One Will See What You’ve Written: Why the Short Story Won’t Go Away
Every so often—sometimes in October, when the annual Best American Short Stories anthology is published, or on the infrequent occasions when an iconic short story writer like George Saunders, Alice Munro, or Lydia Davis wins a major award—an article appears asking a perennial question. As The Guardian put it in 2018: “What is a short story? Why should we read them?” Article continues after advertisement I find these articles amusing and also sad.
STORYKNIFE | Kirkus Reviews
A triumph that undercuts the conditions of its own existence. It’d be reductive to call Row’s latest book a collection of stories about storytelling—it is that, but it’s also about the tropes and limitations, the willful deceptions and endless stretches of suspended disbelief inherent to reading and writing.
Volume 67, Issue 1
SPRING 2026 ISN’T AN EASY READ, but given the times in which we are living, it shouldn’t be. Regarding “The First Spring,” Emma De Lisle’s speaker opens, “It hurt,” while Jacques J.
Review | ‘Putting Myself Together’ displays Jamaica Kincaid’s distinct gifts
Summing up her philosophy of writing in the introduction to “The Best American Essays 1995,” Jamaica Kincaid wrote that an essay has “principles”: “You state, you build on your statement, you sum up.” But, she wondered, “how could I express any truth about myself or anything I might know in the form of state, build, and sum up when everything about me and everything I knew existed in a state of rage, rage, and more rage. I came into being in the colonial situation.
These short-short stories don’t leave you much time to catch your breath
These short-short stories don’t leave you much time to catch your breath (washingtonpost.com) These short-short stories don’t leave you much time to catch your breath By Jess Row 2025041014000000 How do you know you're reading a Lynne Tillman story? It's not always easy.
Alice Munro’s stories were always saturated with neglect and denial
A few days ago, I listened to a song I hadn’t thought about in ages: a cover of John Denver’s “Around and Around” by the indie rock musician Mark Kozelek. There was a time when Kozelek was one of my favorite musicians, but over the decades, I found myself listening to him less and less, partly because, to put it bluntly, he was creeping me out. He often sang in the voice of an isolated, disturbed man, even at times a serial killer.
Eleven Absorbing Personal Narratives to Dive Into this Week...
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by , now featuring four verticals: Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I reprinted “Secrets of the Two by Twos,” by .
Generation Franchise: Why Writers Are Forced to Become Brands (and Why That’s Bad)
Last fall, around the time Britney Spears’s memoir The Woman in Me was published, I went to the Brooklyn stop of Liz Phair’s 30th anniversary tour for her debut album Exile in Guyville. Exile is one of the epochal albums of the 1990s, a Gen X classic; it came out when I was a freshman in college, and every track on it reminds me of a certain lonely dorm room, a wintry campus, an unfinished term paper on W.H. Auden.
Generation Franchise: Why Writers Are Forced to Become Brands (and Why That’s Bad)
7 hours ago I was shocked to learn about some of the celebs who have taken Scientology classes. Content warning: This post contains mentions of sex trafficking, sexual assault, and child abuse. 1. In it: Marisol Nichols The Riverdale star said in the Q&A on her old website that she was introduced to Scientology …
Brit Bennett’s Recommended Reading List - Service95
Service95 Brit Bennett’s Recommended Reading List Service95 Brit Bennett’s Recommended Reading List Service95 Brit Bennett’s Recommended Reading List Service95 Brit Bennett’s Recommended Reading List Service95 Brit Bennett’s Recommended Reading List Service95 Brit Bennett’s Recommended Reading List Service95 Brit Bennett’s Recommended Reading List Service95 Brit Bennett’s Recommended Reading List Service95 Brit Bennett’s Recommended Reading List Service95 Brit Bennett’s Recommended Reading...
Spring 2009
The Spring 2009 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Eleanor Wilner. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles. This issue, edited by prize-winning poet Eleanor Wilner, author of The Girl with Bees in Her Hair, features new work from Maxine Kumin, Jess Row, Terrance Hayes, Alicia Ostriker, Ilya Kaminsky, and many other distinguished poets and writers.
Can a Writer Survive Without Being a Star?
Downtown is filled with the sound / of the full and the part time losers. —Ida, 1996 In the mid-2000s two young sociologists, Matthew Salganik and Duncan Watts, invited 12,000 young Internet users to do an experiment that would let them study how new music becomes popular online. They created a closed, invitation-only social media site—like an ersatz MySpace—where users could listen to and download previously unknown pop songs.
A Novel Is Like A Camp: What Fiction Can Teach Us About Surviving The Slow Apocalypse
JESS ROW My favorite scene in the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild is one that only lasts a moment: we see the inhabitants of the Bathtub, a forgotten village on a dystopian future Gulf Coast, clustered around a fire, drinking, singing, and generally having a good time. The village lies outside a zone of levies that protects the rest of the southern United States (or what inhabitants of the Bathtub call the “dry side”) from the rising waters of the Gulf.
I like big books*
Recently, on a Saturday night where every other member of my family was otherwise engaged, I had the rare pleasure of watching a Very Long Movie. This time it was The Sorrow and the Pity(La Chagrin et La Pitié), Marcel Ophuls’s scorching 1969 documentary on the Nazi occupation of a provincial French city in World War II. The Sorrow and the Pity is four hours long.
'The New Earth': A rich, timely novel about religion, politics and family
Jess Row's timing is impeccable: Two decades after the second intifada, as Israelis now throng the streets of their cities, demanding an end to the overreach of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, Row publishes " The New Earth," a rich, rollicking novel about a dysfunctional Jewish clan from the Upper West Side and the 2003 West Bank tragedy that derailed them.
A Novel is Like a Camp: What Fiction Can Teach Us About Surviving the Slow Apocalypse
My favorite scene in the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild is one that only lasts a moment: we see the inhabitants of the Bathtub, a forgotten village on a dystopian future Gulf Coast, clustered around a fire, drinking, singing, and generally having a good time. The village lies outside a zone of levies that protects the rest of the southern United States (or what inhabitants of the Bathtub call the “dry side”) from the rising waters of the Gulf.
THE NEW EARTH | Kirkus Reviews
by Jess Row ‧ A New York Jewish family confronts its catastrophic past. In his latest novel, Row introduces us to the Wilcox family, a sprawling, dysfunctional group traumatized, in various ways, by several key moments in their past. When their mother, Naomi, informs them that her biological father had been Black, Patrick and his sisters, Winter and Bering, are horrified that she's been keeping that secret for so long.
Summary and Reviews of The New Earth by Jess Row
About This Book Summary Excerpt Book Summary A globe-spanning epic novel about a fractured New York family reckoning with the harms of the past and confronting humanity's uncertain future, from award-winning author Jess Row For fifteen years, the Wilcoxes have been a family in name only. Though never the picture of happiness, they once seemed like a typical white Jewish clan from the Upper West Side. But in the early 2000s, two events ruptured the relationships between them.
Win A Copy Of The Book 'The New Earth: A Novel' By Jess Row
For fifteen years, the Wilcoxes have been a family in name only. Though never the picture of happiness, they once seemed like a typical white Jewish clan from the Upper West Side. But in the early 2000s, two events ruptured the relationships between them. First, Naomi revealed to her children that her biological father was actually Black.
A Family Tree as Racially Mixed as the America It Sprang From (Published 2023)
BENJAMIN BANNEKER AND US: Eleven Generations of an American Family, by Rachel Jamison Webster with Edith Lee Harris, Robert Lett, Gwen Marable and Edwin Lee In 1753, Benjamin Banneker, a free Black farmer in Baltimore County, Md., carved a clock almost entirely out of wood. According to most sources, he based his design on a pocket watch he had borrowed from a family friend and disassembled; he had never seen a larger clock up close.
The New Earth|Hardcover
A globe-spanning epic novel about a fractured New York family reckoning with the harms of the past and confronting humanity’s uncertain future, from award-winning author Jess Row For fifteen years, the Wilcoxes have been a family in name only. Though never the picture of happiness, they once seemed like a typical white Jewish clan from the Upper West Side. But in the early 2000s, two events ruptured the relationships between them.
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
Eleanor Catton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28 (432p) ISBN 978-0-374-11033-8 Booker winner Catton (The Luminaries) returns with a tragic eco-thriller of betrayed ideals and compromised loyalties involving a collective of guerilla gardeners in New Zealand. The group, Birnam Wood, sets its sights on a farm in Korowai National Park after a landslide maroons the isolated township of Thorndike, and three personalities vie for control.
The New Earth by Jess Row
Jess Row. Ecco, $29.99 (592p) ISBN 978-0-06-240063-5 Critic Row’s magisterial latest (after the essay collection White Flights) traces the complex dynamics of a New York City family on a geopolitical scale. In 2000, Wilcox patriarch Sandy, a lawyer, narrowly avoids disbarment after unwittingly aiding a client of fraud. A year later, his wife, Naomi, a geophysicist at Columbia University, reveals that her biological father was Black.
Late Blues
Once long ago—before Georgia was born, before getting married, in the days when apartments consisted of pee-stained futons and speaker wires tracing across the floor, guitars laid lovingly in their plush cases, overflowing ashtrays, no artwork, no plants, only temperamental cats for decoration—Carrie wrote a song about divorce that became a college-radio hit.
A Year in Reading: Krys Malcolm Belc
Two thousand twenty-one was a year of reading lonely people. As one year melted into another, Claire Danes read me Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey. I walked around a cold and gray and empty Philadelphia, embittered and lonely and feeling brattily like I was entitled to another life. I scoffed at the man in the epic traveling the world feeling the same. He was out to sea in his way, I in mine, kicking rocks down the sidewalk in Fishtown. More lonely protagonists awaited me.
Review: Marilynne Robinson's new novel tackles racism, but glosses over its history
Marilynne Robinson, whose most recent novel in the Gilead series is "Jack." (Alex Soth / Magnum Photos) This past August the New York Times ran an investigative report about Sioux Center, Iowa, a small town that serves as a refuge for members of the Dutch Reformed Church, a tiny subset of the American evangelical movement.
Jess Row: Native Sons
Image from Flickr via Kal Ashraf By Jess Row For years now I’ve been telling people that my favorite postwar American novel—the novel that’s had the most influence on my own work—is James Baldwin’s Another Country, originally published in 1962. This gets me a lot of startled looks.
White people are already experts on racism
(CNN)When I knew him in the mid-1990s, Nick (as I'll call him here) bore a disconcerting resemblance to Dickie Greenleaf, the character played by Jude Law in "The Talented Mr. Ripley." He came from a wealthy New England family on Boston's North Shore; he'd been expelled from a dozen prep schools and barely graduated from college; he was effortlessly good at all sports and was the center of attention wherever he went.
Right Behind The Rain
by kathryn parkman 11/01/2019 Imaginary Oklahoma is an ongoing project in which some of today’s most important and influential writers combine with artists to provide a fictional take on this place we call home. Through a wide variety of voices, styles and literary devices, these works prove that “Oklahoma” is much more than a place, it’s an idea. Let me explain something: Oklahoma was not my idea. It happened this way.
The 20 Best Essay Collections of 2019 to Add to Your TBR
Calling all essay fans! For your reading pleasure, I’ve rounded up the best essay collections of 2019. It was a fabulous year for essays (although I say that about most years, to be honest). We’ve had some stellar anthologies of writing about disability, feminism, and the immigrant experience. We’ve had important collections about race, mental health, the environment, and media. And we’ve had collections of personal essays to entertain us and make us feel less alone.
Charlottesville, two years later: Have we learned nothing? (opinion)
Editor’s Note: Jess Row is the author of White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, just published by Graywolf Press. The views expressed here are his. Read more opinion on CNN. CNN — The Unite the Right riot in Charlottesville in 2017 was the largest eruption of white supremacist violence in the United States in a generation, if only the most visible of thousands of incidents that followed the 2016 election.
The Best Reviewed Books of the Week
Jia Tolentino’s debut essay collection, Ruth Ware’s gothic thriller, and Jess Row’s examination of white flight in American literature are among the most critically-acclaimed books of the past seven days * Article continues after advertisement Fiction 1.
Parts of Us Not Made at Home
Illustration by Xia Gordon. For decades—no one knows exactly how long—my grandfather kept a portrait of his mother, the only image that remained of her, in the back of his bedroom closet, facing the wall. When we discovered it after he died, in 1998, no one, not even my step-grandmother, knew it was there. The portrait showed a woman with an impatient expression and very striking features: dark hair, and prominent dark eyebrows, set a little higher in the oval of the face than you might expect.
Reading the Hidden Racial Life of American Fiction
Nonfiction Image The author Ta-Nehisi Coates testifies about reparations for descendants of slaves at a congressional hearing in June. Aug 6, 2019 WHITE FLIGHTS Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination By Jess Row If you were looking for a primer on our nation’s ability to discuss its racial history, you couldn’t do much better than the remarks by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, on the eve of the House Judiciary Committee’s hearings in June on H.R. 40.
Beautiful Shame - Believer Magazine
Here is the voice of a man telling a story. The man is a doctor; the story is about one of his patients, an elderly rancher who along with his wife has barely survived a terrible car accident. Their names are Henry and Anna Gates. Because of their injuries, they have to recover in separate rooms, and Henry becomes severely depressed, even while knowing Anna is nearby and on the mend.
Jess Row - White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination - in conversation with Rion Amilcar Scott - at Politics and Prose at Union Market | Politics and Prose Bookstore
Looking primarily at literature, but also at music and film, Row traces a literary “white flight” that parallels and bolsters the social movement of white Americans into segregated suburbs and gentrified communities.
Remembering Toni Morrison’s Great, Unfinished Mission
Photo: Bettmann Archive Begin with unabashed joy, at the end of Toni Morrison’s 1977 masterpiece Song of Solomon: “Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees — he leaped.
Want To Understand Racism and Neglect in Baltimore? Read Anne Tyler.
Photo credit: Baltimore Sun Baltimore has been much in the news in the past week, in the worst possible way. Searching for a new punching bag — since the Squad is so adept at punching back! — the current occupant of the White House struck close to home, but, as many Washingtonians will say about Baltimore with a sigh of relief, not too close.
On Seeing, Waking, and Being Woke
Caravaggio, Narcissus, ca. 1595, oil on canvas, 43″ x 36″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I saw Edward Hopper’s Pennsylvania Coal Town for the first time in a gallery on Madison Avenue in 1994. I was a freshman in college; I had come into New York on the train for the day, alone. It was February. I had never been in a New York art gallery before, but I had seen reproductions of Nighthawks, and I wanted to know more.
The Quintessential American Hymn of Redemption Was Written by a Slave Trader
“Amazing Grace,” the song that informs all generic American notions of epiphanic thinking, was written by the English curate and former slave trader John Newton in 1772. Newton’s activity in the slave trade is well documented, including an incident when he was aboard ship for insubordination, then actually enslaved himself and forced to work on a plantation in what is now Sierra Leone.
Jess Row's 'White Flights' Examines Avoidant Rituals of Race in American Literature
White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination Jess Row Graywolf Press Aug 2019 iTunes Jess Row, author of the novel Your Face and Mine (Riverhead, 2014) and the story collections The Train to Lo Wu (Dial, 2005)and Nobody Ever Gets Lost (FiveChapters, 2011), offers a complex, personal meditation on whiteness in White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination.
How to Grant Your Child an Inner Life
So many of the worst nightmares of parenting start with a phone call: a child out of arm’s reach, not in the house, not in her bed. Or, in this case, a text on a rainy night from my daughter to my wife, who then relayed a command to me: go pick her up now. Instead of taking the subway to the Upper West Side, as I would have any other night, I got into my car and dashed up the West Side Highway.
‘Blasphemy,’ by Sherman Alexie
In his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin drew a sharp distinction between prose fiction, meaning novels and short stories, and actual storytelling, meaning spoken narratives passed from one individual to another. The essential quality of storytelling, Benjamin wrote, is lived experience: “Every story contains, openly or covertly, something useful . . . a moral; some practical advice; a proverb or maxim. In every case the storyteller has counsel for his readers.
Book Review | 'The Thing Around Your Neck,' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Midway through Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first story collection, “The Thing Around Your Neck,” a gentlemanly British professor who has convened a workshop of African writers at a resort near Cape Town pronounces a Tanzanian’s story about massacres in Congo just the thing he wants for his magazine. “It was urgent and relevant,” Adichie writes.
My Family Celebrates All the Holidays
Whether private or public, religious or not, the repetition of rituals is a way of marking time, of looking forward and backward at once. Illustration by Josh Cochran A few years ago, while I was updating our family’s Google calendar—or worrying about not having updated it, which to me is more or less an identical state of mind—I realized that, during the school year, September through June, we celebrate a holiday roughly once every two weeks. I don’t know why it took me so long to notice.
Why Is Being Held Accountable So Terrifying Under Patriarchy?
Of all the inexplicable events in Genesis, the story of Noah’s nakedness and its consequences stands alone. It’s an easy story to sum up. Noah got drunk and fell asleep naked; his son Ham saw him. Ham told his two brothers, Shem and Japheth, who, out of respect for their father, walked backward into Noah’s tent, so as not to see him, and put a garment over him.
Dear Yale
It’s been much too long. But enough about that. Don’t think of me angry. Think of me as I am, standing at the mailbox on a sunny September mid-morning, a light breeze kicking up a swirl of dust and aster leaves around my legs. Cane hooked over my arm, I steady myself against the post, and run my finger under the flap, heedless of paper cuts, like a little boy with a birthday card.
Haitian Fathers - NYTimes.com
Joseph Dantica, one of two brothers at the heart of this family memoir, was a remarkable man: a Baptist minister who founded his own church and school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; a survivor of throat cancer who returned to the pulpit using a mechanical voice box; a loyal husband and family man who raised his niece Edwidge Danticat to the age of 12, when she joined her parents in Brooklyn.
Fiction Archives - Guernica
Fiction Fiction by Brandon Taylor September 19, 2019 She’d cried because she had expected it to be awful, and it hadn’t been. But she felt embarrassed about the kiss, and she’d asked Sigrid if she could just lie there next to her, if it was all right just to be in bed together, and Sigrid had said, Of course, of course which had felt both like an act of mercy and an act of contrition. Fiction Fiction by Elaine Hsieh Chou September 12, 2019 I brought my lips to my calf and licked.
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