William Giraldi

Biography

William Giraldi is the author of three novels, one memoir, and a collection of literary criticism. His new memoir, Pure Jersey (Liveright), is forthcoming. He is master lecturer in the Writing Program at Boston University.

See Work

CRITICISM / Winter 2015

On Loving Literature

By William Giraldi

First, a distinction. When I employ the term academic in what follows, I will not mean the first definition, the technical one: individuals who teach college students. I will mean the second definition, the sullied one: individuals for whom...
CRITICISM / Summer 2014

Sigmund Freud, the Never-Ending Storyteller

By William Giraldi

Adam Phillips’s new study, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, is an effective breviary and defense of Sigmund Freud, and not because it dazzles with a tightrope act of theory, but because it simply and directly underscores Freud...
CRITICISM / Winter 2014

The Way of All Flesh

By William Giraldi

You probably won’t be around for your death, and it’s probably all right that you miss it.

212 RECENT BOOKS it does, and for Leo Tolstoy’s character Ivan Ily - ich, dying is a protracted process that assumes just as much importance as living— a process that indeed takes meaning away from or gives it to the life lived. Who but Vladimir Nabokov, in his peerless Lectures on Russian Literature , could have no - ticed that “Ilyich” is pronounced ill - itch — “the ills and itches of mortal life.” Nabokov was clear in pointing out that Tolstoy’s famous no - vella is not about Ivan’s death, but about hi
CRITICISM / Summer 2013

Faithful Grieving: On Christian Wiman

By William Giraldi

The trick in producing a spiritual memoir spurred by disease is circumventing the fact that you have become a cliché: Of course you discovered or rediscovered your god during a grievous bout with cancer—doesn’t everyone?