Pamela Erens

Biography

Pamela Erens is the author of the forthcoming Matasha (Ig, 2021), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch: Bookmarked (Ig, 2022). Her most recent books are Eleven Hours (Tin House, 2016), The Virgins (Tin House, 2013), and The Understory (Ironweed, 2007). She has been a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

See Work

ESSAYS / Winter 2020

Frantumaglia

By Pamela Erens ,  Illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban

Elena Ferrante’s Blurred Lines

Illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban
ESSAYS / Fall 2018

Old Ideas

By Pamela Erens


The first poem in Leonard Cohen’s posthumous book The Flame made me laugh. Not because the lyrics are especially funny (although there are touches of Cohen’s characteristic wry humor), and not because the poem is foolish (it’s quite good)...

Leonard Cohen, London, June 1974. (Michael Putland/Getty Images)
FICTION / Spring 2016

Nineteen Minutes

By Pamela Erens ,  Illustration by Pat Perry

This time, as the contraction mounts, Lore does not cry out, but her face is tense and grim. In fighting back her cries of fear she is fighting her body, too, and the nurse, Franckline, can feel the inner muscles clenching against the...
CRITICISM / Fall 2015

Knausgaard’s Triumph

By Pamela Erens

All of this is surprisingly interesting, even addictive, as has often been pointed out in reviews. But no one can pinpoint precisely why. A striking element in the praise of Knausgaard—and he has garnered almost uniform praise in the...
MEMOIR / Spring 2015

Crave

By Pamela Erens

Yet even when my disorder was at its worst, there were pleasures I can still recall. I considered it “okay” to eat when I was genuinely hungry. I don’t know if this was permission I’d received from Fat Is a Feminist Issue, a book I turned...