I found A Little Life fascinating, if not “good,” and have still yet to locate a text quite so consuming that also felt like it was actively daring me to turn each page. Its perpetual appearance on reading lists, celebrity Instagram stories, and bookshop displays catapulted Yanagihara to a rarified, out-of-fashion level of celebrity matched only in our day, perhaps, by Sally Rooney. “Writer writes, public takes note” is not much of a story, but Yanagihara is no ordinary writer: her last novel, 2015’s A Little Life, was the unlikeliest literary blockbuster in recent memory, a gothic 800-page tome whose success (millions of copies sold, wide critical acclaim, winner of the Kirkus Prize, finalist for the Man Booker and National Book Award) was rivaled only by its backlash (a scathing corrective in the New York Review of Books, heaps of internet reviewers deeming the novel intolerable torture porn).
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