Reading Archive

Begin Again: On Endings in Nonfiction

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Talking, or writing, about endings is hard—whether it’s the end of a marriage, the end of a life, or the end of a book (lest one spoil the conclusion). Life rarely offers sudden and definitive endings or epiphanic conclusions. Rather, events leading up to the end seem to be

Good Little Girls

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What happens when young women try to fight against the urge to be good and undisruptive?

The High-Low Collapse in Dana Ward’s The Crisis of Infinite Worlds

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Dana Ward’s collection is the very picture of postmodern poetry: compulsively self-conscious and concerned with the act of writing as much as with the subject of his writing.

Flickerings of an Innermost Flame: A Hundred Years of the Hogarth Press

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In a 1917 letter to a family friend, Virginia Woolf announced a new endeavor with her husband, Leonard: “We have bought our Press! We don’t know how to work it, but now I must find some young novelists or poets. Do you know any?”

Takin’ It to the Streets

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It only seems natural to want a temporary escape from our current state of affairs, and as an avid writer and reader, books seems like the obvious answer. But is it the correct one?

Sappho’s Tweets: A New Kind of Fragment

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What does it mean for an ancient poet and her translator—both women—to be taking up this kind of space in our Twitter timelines?

Mindfulness and Rainer Maria Rilke

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Often cited as self-help before the genre existed, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet contain much wisdom in few pages.

Kissing Walt Whitman

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I saw all the things we consider “Whitmanesque”: the energy, the exuberance, the empathy. And one thing that my mother’s serene portrait had not prepared me for—the eroticism.

“The Zero Meter Diving Team” and the Risks of Obedience

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I’ve long been a well-behaved person, and as an adult I have come to suspect that this isn’t one of my more admirable traits. This suspicion, I think, is part of what draws me so intensely to Jim Shepard’s wonderful heartbreak of a story “The Zero-Meter Diving Team."

Disrupting Silicon Valley in Janice Lobo Sapigao’s microchips for millions

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In her debut collection microchips for millions, Janice Lobo Sapigao disrupts Silicon Valley through poetry, revealing the structural violence that is encoded into it.