Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

Perhaps crisis forces commonality of purpose on one another.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

After living in the United States for over 10 years, here is what I have learned about the Fourth of July: it is more of a barbecuing holiday than anything else.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

When Paul Beatty's 'The Sellout' was first published in America in 2015, it was a small release. It got a rave review in the daily 'New York Times' and one in the weekly 'New York Times Book Review,' too, for good measure. But by and large, it was not a conversation-generating book.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

In an age where television is viewed as the best medium to 'tell stories,' narrative often stands in for substance on would-be prestige shows.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

Bad criticism recites rote arguments. The shame of rote arguments isn't just that they're cliches, though they are, but that they tend to hide from us why a critic is actually thinking what they're thinking.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

Vacation reading is not a new concept. Ever since the 19th century, when novels were considered relatively sinful indulgences, leisure and fiction-reading have been closely associated.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

Dan Brown and the 'Da Vinci Code' have been around well over a decade now, and to be perfectly honest, both he and it have become a joke.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

Since the era of 'Sherlock Holmes,' private detectives had long been able to influence cases on their own. But the online detective, who had no sort of professional training or even long practice, is a purely modern phenomenon. The Internet changed everything by letting anyone become a self-appointed 'expert' on a case.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

The Festival of Books is indeed a well-oiled machine, one which leaves most of the other literary festivals in America, including vaunted Brooklyn's, in the dust.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

The phenomenon of Instagram poets - who are also, to be fair, Tumblr poets and Pinterest poets - has been one of the more surprising side-effects of the selfie age.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

The first thing I remember feeling about the 2016 U.S. election was a kind of speechlessness.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

Most people do not pay attention to the publisher's imprint on a given book.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

The plot of 'Stranger Things' is so simple that even a brief description risks spoiling it.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

I've come, even as a feminist, to dread the phrase 'female friendship,' because it tends to signal overdetermined relationships.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

Prestige podcasts, like prestige television shows, tend to have an audience that believes itself literate, well-informed, and reasonable. Listening to podcasts, in this model, is a form of virtue.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

When a woman shouts, she isn't usually praised for it. She's condemned as aggressive and coarse.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

I have deliberately arranged my life so that I see pictures of cute animals on the Internet every day.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

Summer is always a tricky time to recommend new literary fiction. The big releases do not hit until fall.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

If you care about a subject, there's a podcast for it.

Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean

There's no good way to be the center of a media maelstrom you did not choose for yourself.