Rachel Cusk’s Lonely Experiment
First she abandoned plot in her fiction; now characters must go.
![upside-down color-pencil sketch in blues and purples of the author's face and hair](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/M2WBTh8eNisySaegAWquT0sG_Hc=/438x0:1563x1125/80x80/media/img/2024/06/CC_Shulevitz_Cusk_HP/original.png)
First she abandoned plot in her fiction; now characters must go.
The celebrity poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon mesmerized a 19th-century public with hints of dark secrets.
As beloved as Shakespeare, she shaped a vision of personal flourishing that still feels thoroughly modern.
Following the persevering example of the writer and activist Grace Paley
For an influential group of writers, the purpose of novels is to bear witness to the spectacle of aloneness.
A new novel portrays the young writer of The Pickwick Papers as a conniving founder of modern mass culture.