Reading Archive
Douglas Kearney and the 21st Century Remix
I was at a lecture recently about The Iliad—that beloved epic gorefest—when the scholar discussing the text referred to its author as “DJ Homer.” It wasn’t so much that Homer composed the text of The Iliad, he said. It was more that he remixed old stories that had been
The Best Poem I Read This Month: Jayy Dodd’s “Black Philosophy #3”
“Black Philosophy #3,” Dodd’s new poem from the first issue of The Shade Journal, poses a series of “if…then…” questioning statements regarding blackness, black boys, death, dead boys, living boys, pretty boys, prettiness, and a manner of interrelating, interlocking, and uncompromising conditions between those terms.
Why Canada’s First Nations Men Might Fight for Colonists
Three Day Road, a historical fiction story about two Cree Natives, Xavier and Elijah, who volunteer to enter WWI fighting for Canada is tough to put down. Part Métis, Boyden lets us inside the world of the First Nations people enough to see how well their skills as hunters
Who Saves the World
A girl who saves the world: isn’t this key to what draws us in droves to post-apocalyptic, dystopian, and otherwise speculative fictions? That they’re often only accounts of ruin on the surface; beyond that, and in the vein of what makes them utterly necessary, they’re stories of survival and
Step Inside My Skin and Dance Around in It: On Literary Translation
For days, while I revised my translation, I looked for the right words to tell the protagonist’s mother that he’s terminally ill. Even though the protagonist’s life is nothing like my own, I couldn’t help but climb inside his skin and walk around in it.
Moments in the Rose-Garden: The Literature of Stillness
When my brother and I were kids, my parents would watch what we called “screensaver movies”: films that moved at a leisurely pace and boasted periods of little action in the traditional sense, featuring instead long, lingering shots of landscapes, interiors, characters’ expressions. We mocked and groused.
The Silence Waits, Wild To Be Broken: Posthumous Publications and the Lives of Poems
My role on the uncollected was simple: as a third-year grad student in Virginia Commonwealth University’s MFA program, I was to go to the Levis Archives held at VCU’s Cabell Library and check old xeroxes against the holdings to make sure these were the last drafts of the poems.
Revolutionary Road and Doing What You Love
In these moments, my wife is in the thrall of what 1843 and Economist writer Ryan Avent recently called flow, “the process of losing oneself in a puzzle with a solution on which other people depend.” The subject of Avent’s essay is the tendency of modern work to fill
Island Time with The Durrells
Somewhere between Downton Abbey, Little House on the Prairie, Arrested Development and The Swiss Family Robinson are The Durrells in Corfu. The Durrells is based on the first book of classic semi-autobiographical trilogy "My Family and Other Animals," by conservationist Gerald Durrell.
Fracking, Glove Making, and Elevator Inspection: Industry in Novels
I delighted in Alexandra Petri’s column, “An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel.” A writer must be able to laugh, kindly, at herself, and perhaps less kindly at others, especially when those others are extremely successful.