#literary-criticism

#literary-criticism

Acocella's essay deals with the improbable five-year affair between the Left Bank philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and the tough-guy Chicago writer Nelson Algren-its title comes from their pet names for each other-and was occasioned by the posthumous publication of Beauvoir's love letters. Acocella begins with a block quote from one of the letters, a rarely attempted flex that may be the critic's equivalent of opening a song with the bridge.

"A writer," Saul Bellow once observed, "is a reader moved to emulation." But what if it's also the other way around? What if, when we think about writing, we are actually teaching ourselves how to read? For me, the act of setting words to paper always exists in conjunction with the question of what I have been reading-and why. Books, after all, require readers to bring them to life.

That Cummins' Puerto Rican grandmother should come into this discussion seems very much a product of the heated cultural moment into which American Dirt was published.