The question of why writers write is a lot like the question of why people marry, which is to say, it is the eternal question of why human beings knowingly commit themselves to tiresome and ...

In Sigmund Freud’s “Rat Man,” a case history of a neurotic young man, there is a curious footnote about the natural uncertainty of paternity. For a man to believe that his father truly was his father, ...

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Because there are many things to say about Susan Taubes’s remarkable 1969 novel “Divorcing,” and ...

“I died on a Tuesday afternoon, struck by a car as I was crossing Avenue George V,” announces our narrator, Sophie Blind, close to the start of “Divorcing.” “Now I am dead I care only for truth.” That ...

In her famous work “A Room of One’s Own” (1929), Virginia Woolf imagines a sister of Shakespeare, whom she names Judith. Woolf explores the reasons why so few women have made their mark in literature ...

The American novelist Susan Taubes drowned herself off the coast of East Hampton in 1969 at the age of 41. She had suffered from severe depression for a long time, but many friends thought the ...

David Rieff discusses “Divorcing” by Susan Taubes, an autobiographical novel with phantasmagoric components: the reimagined end of a marriage. Now republished by New York Review Books, it was first ...

Her previously unreleased fiction—a novella and short stories—in Lament for Julia peek into the banal and nightmarish travails of married life. La Nuit (Night), Henri Fantin-Latour, 1897.(Photo by Art ...

This tantalizing and surprising posthumous novella from Taubes (Divorcing), who died in 1969, is presented here with several of her short stories, all hovering around similar themes of isolation, ...