Briallen Hopper is the author of Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions (Bloomsbury, 2019), a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and a CBC Best International Nonfiction Book of the Year. She has been writing for LARB since 2012 and is proud to say that seven of the essays in Hard to Love originally appeared in LARB or its channel Avidly. Thanks to an unexpected shout-out from John Green, her review of The Fault in Our Stars remains the most-clicked piece in LARB history. She is co-editor-in chief of the literary magazine Killing the Buddha, associate editor at the independent press And Other Stories, and assistant professor of creative nonfiction at Queens College, CUNY, where she teaches in the MFA program. She can be found online on Twitter and Instagram and on her website.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
The Lost Arc of Love
Briallen Hopper traces “The Arc of Love,” the recently published book by Aaron Ben-Ze’ev....
Writing Together
Briallen Hopper appreciates "The Mutual Admiration Society," a new book from Mo Moulton....
Waveforms and the Women’s March
Briallen Hopper on what we can learn from the Women's March....
Remembering How It Felt to Burn: Robin Wasserman’s “Girls on Fire”
Robin Wasserman's "Girls on Fire" is a mystery and a tangled love triangle and a ruthless thriller, and it’s satisfying and troubling on all these levels....
On “Sisters”
"Sisters" celebrates a friendly kind of sisterhood that is all girl power and no grief....
On Spinsters
The classic spinster challenges our understanding of love, sex, family, and power....
White Christmas and Black December
The #BlackLivesMatter movement, and the deaths that spurred it, should make all of us who celebrate ask: What does Christmas mean this year? And what should it mean?...
Young Adult Cancer Story
“I only know what it’s like to read The Fault in Our Stars as a woman in my mid-30s who is friends with a woman in her mid-30s who, like Hazel Grace Lancaster, has incurable Stage 4 cancer.”...
Coming Home to The Best Years of Our Lives
I USED TO SAY that The Best Years of Our Lives was like a religion to me. In college I watched ...
Strange Bedfellows
on Christianity and homosexuality...
