Kelly Coyne is a student in Northwestern’s PhD program in film and media studies. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Millions, and&nbsp;Literary Hub, as well as in academic journals.

Kelly Coyne

Single Girls Forever: How TV Envisions Friendship Between Women

"Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television." —Woody Allen

Television

Anna Brisker is a 29-year-old graduate student in English at Collegiate University who can’t seem to finish her dissertation in Juliet Lapidos’s wickedly funny debut, TALENT (Little, Brown; January 22, 2019). Her project: an intellectual history of inspiration. Her take: that the way writers and artists describe the moment of inspiration — that it strikes indiscriminately, that it’s handed down from on high and entirely out of their control — is really just self-serving bullshit designed to elevate the artist above the rest of us. To Anna, whose academic prowess has never been in question, inspiration is just another name for good old-fashioned work. Plain and simple. And yet, for the first time, Anna has found herself utterly and truly uninspired. Rather than work on her thesis, she spends her days eating strawberry Pop-Tarts and wandering the streets of New Harbor in a state of perpetual procrastination.
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It’s amid this unnerving stasis that Anna meets and strikes up a tenuous friendship with Helen Langley, a strangely compelling, free-spirited woman with a penchant for rare book forgery, who just so happens to be the niece of the legendary short story writer Frederick Langley. Freddy quickly penned three wildly successful collections as a young man in the 1960s, then published exactly nothing for the rest of his wayward, hermetic life. A possibly fatal case of writer’s block, or so say the critics; as Helen confides to Anna, Freddy kept secret notebooks in the last years of his life that are now under lock and key at Collegiate’s Elston Library, viewable at Helen’s sole discretion. Inspired, uninspired, potentially reinspired — a perfect case study for Anna’s dissertation, and one she simply cannot pass up. But as her initial fascination with Freddy Langley and his notebooks blooms into zealous obsession, Anna finds herself falling irrevocably into the criminal machinations of his sole living heir.
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This taut, hilarious, and hugely intelligent novel is a many-layered labyrinth of possible truths that reveals at each turn the great danger of interpreting another person’s intentions, literary or otherwise. As Kirkus&nbsp;puts it, “Anna is embroiled in a game of literary detection that’s spurred, like all good detective stories, by a combination of curiosity, lust, and petty revenge.” In TALENT,Lapidos has crafted a deftly told mystery and a probing examination of the human mind and its fickle ways, all in the unsuspecting guise of a classic campus novel.

Talent

Queering the Language of Female Friendship in Juliet Lapidos’s “Talent”

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

The Confessional Peep Show: Pleasure, Pornography, and “The Deuce”

"As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag." — Patti Smith

Gender &amp; Sexuality

Sylvia Plath’s Magic Mirror

Gothic Camp: The Beales of East Hampton

"There is only one thing that can kill the Movies, and that is education." — Will Rogers

Film