Lyrical, brooding, and delightfully dreamlike, the novel is a strange and ruthless journey into the ailing heart of humanity—and a bizarre peek into the mind of a brilliant new novelist.
An Ink Droplet in a Glass of Water: On “The Natashas” by Yelena Moskovich Read More »
“Just historically, a lot of poets have had a bad time in their forties. Writers start publishing in their late twenties or early thirties—I think that’s when most poets probably begin to publish. I started a little bit earlier than that. At some level, I feel as though I’ve had very lucky innings, and I suppose I’m thinking about myself:  when is it going to stop, or has it already stopped? How am I going to keep myself honest?”
The Invention of the I: A Conversation with Paul Muldoon Read More »
By producing work that lectures but does not necessarily converse with its viewers, DinéYazhà offers visitors a taste of Native peoples’ colonial experience: forever on the receiving end of (often unsolicited) information, of change, of aggression.
Remembrance, Indignation, Confrontation: The Art of Demian DinéYazhà Read More »
In a moment in which our country’s various wars, Revolutionary, Civil, World, and otherwise, are trawled for something to give meaning to our present calamities, studying the Kellogg brothers’ era and milieu is a refreshing and much-needed reminder that much of the reason why daily life looks the way it does owes not to generals or presidents, but to the works of scientists and businesspeople.
It isn’t the answers of healing and redemption that Saterstrom celebrates, but rather the questions themselves, which forever circle overhead in the rapturous, uncertain, electric, and paradoxical present.
Rupture, Revelation, and Reading-as-Being: On Selah Saterstrom’s “Ideal Suggestions” Read More »
Mario Vargas Llosa writes in “Why Literature?”, his 2001 essay for The New Republic, that “literary illusion lifts and transports us outside of history, and we become citizens in a timeless land, and in this way immortal.” Though Vargas Llosa is specifically referring to literary fiction, the same feeling pervades Carl Dennis’s extraordinary thirteenth collection of poems, Night School.
A Kosmos of Buffalo: A Review of Carl Dennis’s “Night School” Read More »
“I think my poems are all Jewish because they’re all curious, and they’re all petitioning, in one way or another.”
Confessional Imagination: An Interview with Rachel Mennies Read More »
So why, today, is autofiction making such a comeback? What does it do, or appear to do, that other forms do not? My guess is that, given how in our ethos, in the age of social media, privacy is passé and the personal is public, many readers want from their authors what they want from their friends on Facebook: personal transparency.
More Life: On Contemporary Autofiction and the Scourge of “Relatability” Read More »
“Families of victims are allowed to grieve openly and freely if they choose, because their loved one was exactly that: an innocent victim. Families of shooters don’t have the choice to grieve openly, because they not only must carry the burden of grief, but also blame.”
The Space Between: An Interview with Kali VanBaale Read More »
I wonder, now, of all the stories she might have told had I worked harder to defy her, to learn her native language. I wonder how much more I have lost of my mother because I could not truly speak to her.
The Word for Water Read More »
