Selected Essays
Veteran New Yorker now living in Abu Dhabi (which is not Dubai); novelist, literary critic, literature professor at NYU Abu Dhabi and former columnist for The National, the English-language newspaper of the UAE. Writes about culture, art, books, family, the perils of parenthood, feminism, travel, teaching and learning. Loves essays, historical fiction, and semi-colons. Co-editor of the Oxford History of the Novel in English Volume Eight: US Literature From 1940. Works in progress: "The Corset and the Veil," a novel based on the extraordinary life of Lady Hester Stanhope; and "Children's Literature and the Post-National Imagination," which explores how YA literature written "after the American century," to use Brian Edwards' term, is moving to a post-national view of the world.
Selected Essays
By DEBORAH LINDSAY WILLIAMS "We need to do more, Mom," my son tells me. He's fifteen, supports the Kurdish resistance and fancies himself an anarcho-socialist ("It's not like being an anarchist, Mom, okay?"). The Young Socialist lives in a state of perpetual indignation about the state of the world.
At least once a semester, I have a conversation that goes something like this: a colleague looks at her students' essays and moans, "They just can't write." When I ask how much class time she spends talking about student writing, I'm told quite sharply that "there is way too much material to cover to spend time on that, so I just give them a handout.
On Campus ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates - "My grandmother told me that the man is the head and the woman is the neck," said an East European student in my class. "It makes me so mad. I don't want to be the neck."
The Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel, opened in November after years of delay and a cost rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The same weekend as LAD's grand opening, the NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center hosted the world premiere of Parable of the Sower, an opera composed by the singer/songwriter Toshi Reagon, a queer Brooklyn-based activist, and based on the prophetic novel by Octavia Butler.
What Would Hannah Gadsby Do? You can keep your Jesus bracelets with their WWJD reminders. I'm getting a bracelet that asks WWHGD: What Would Hannah Gadsby Do? Ever since I watched Nanette, her one-hour comedy show that everyone you know is probably telling you to watch (they're right; you should), I haven't been able to get Hannah out of my mind.
By Deborah Lindsay Williams @mannahattamamma My son is seventeen. He regularly goes to parties where there are girls and lots of booze, and he doesn't keep a calendar, unless you call "writing things on my hand so I don't forget" a calendar.
By Deborah Williams @mannahattamamma The screams echo out of my son's room: Look out! Get that guy! No, no, on the LEFT, shoot him, oh my god you missed, you loser, how did you not GET him? You're useless-wait, now! SHOOT NOW! His bellowing warms my heart.
My boys are 18 and 15-their silky baby cheeks have long since vanished in whiffs of aftershave and occasional razor stubble and when they hug me, I can feel the muscles bunching across their shoulders. I think to myself, "they're good boys," but then like a malevolent ghost the thought floats in: what if I'm wrong?
"Is that what really happened?" The student who asks me this question is not being disingenuous. We are in a literature class that is part of New York University Abu Dhabi's core curriculum, and he is pointing to pictures in Art Spiegelman's book Maus that show starving Auschwitz prisoners being beaten by Nazi guards.
Selected Academic Essays