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Christen Aragoni

Christen Aragoni is a senior editor at The American Prospect.

Recent Articles

The Part of Silence That Can Be Spoken

Jeanette Winterson’s fairy-tale search for a mother

Christen AragoniMar 08, 2012

For some writers, mothers are everywhere. They slip off windy cliffs and fall to their death; they follow a star to an orphanage and choose a child in a crib. They are the Dog Woman, fleshy and unwashed and unafraid to kill. They rescue the baby who, like some kind of Moses, is abandoned in the Thames, and they bring him up as their own.

Who Has the Castle Now?

A new biography gives Kurt Vonnegut his due.

Christen AragoniNov 11, 2011

On Sunday December 7, 1941, as reports of the bombing of Pearl Harbor poured in, the night editor of The Cornell Daily Sun rushed to lay out the pages for a special edition. A chemistry student who was flunking his classes, he spent more time penning columns and pulling campus pranks than studying. His name was Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

By Charles J. Shields

The Family Album

A journal of grief and aging, Blue Nights is missing Joan Didion's razor-sharp prose.

Christen AragoniNov 01, 2011

What matters are the details. The 60 baby dresses on miniature wooden hangers, the loose pearls in a satin-lined jeweler's box, the bright red soles of the wedding shoes, the white stephanotis in the bride's braided hair. These specifics do not add up to a story; they are a compilation of the past, a messy collage of what used to be. Some are memories to be avoided, "reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted." Author Joan Didion's latest memoir, Blue Nights, is more journal than narrative, a meditation on grief and aging that jumps in time and place and sucks its readers into its fears and anxieties.