Reading Archive
Obama & GILEAD: Lessons on Loving Thy Neighbor
Recently, an interview that Barack Obama gave in 1995—which was republished in The New Yorker just before the Presidential Inauguration in 2009—made the rounds on social media again.
How to Do Things With Readings: After Cave Canem’s 20th Anniversary
Like any literary form or rule, the poetry reading raises questions regarding subjectivity and context: whose conventions are these, what do they enable, and how do they suit the projects at hand?
In Bookstores Near You: THE BLACK MARIA by Arcelis Girmay
I found Aracelis Girmay's the black maria in a month filled with keen grief, the kind that follows a tragedy like Orlando or the loss of a loved one so paramount to your life that afterward people just going about their lives seem like a perverse mystery.
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “The Howler” by LaTanya McQueen
In modern society, what often constitutes progress is the dulling elimination of those instinctual parts of our being that aren’t beholden to conscious thought—say, our hard-wired physical and emotional responses. In “The Howler” (Permafrost) LaTanya McQueen explores the potentially redemptive nature of those impulses that lay beyond our control.
Writ in Water: Yellow Not Mellow
A sight now common across California: the yellow toilet bowl. Conscientiously curated, it’s a light shade of daffodil, lemon, banana; this is early in the lifespan, the visitors before you healthy and drinking plenty of water.
Feminism by Way of Tragic Misogyny in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
In social justice activism, offensive rhetoric is considered a form of toxic pollution. Language shapes our culture, society, and schema for thinking about different groups, and so can never be considered harmless.
Living Between Languages: Notes on Language and Loss
I was seventeen years old when I started working at the front desk of a beach resort in my coastal city in Brazil and began to teach myself my first sentences in English. In the tourism industry, English was currency, and as such I wanted to earn it.
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Float,” by Reginald McKnight
An encounter with the unexplainable can evoke awe, terror, confusion, denial—a whole spectrum of emotions. In “Float” (The Georgia Review), Reginald McKnight explores how a young narrator deals with encountering the unexplainable in his own home, and what ramifications that has for our society at large.
On Compromise and Character
In The Bay of Angels, author Anita Brookner examines female relationships with unflinching scrutiny. Sometimes I felt like a bug trapped under a hand lens on the pavement, squirming with discomfort, somewhat scorched by the proximity of her fictional approximations and truth.
Review: THE CHILDREN by Ann Leary
When I recently entered Ann Leary’s, The Good House, I found myself enjoying some of the quirkiest, most human, and authentically rendered company in Leary’s characters, each of which inspired me to get to know more of her work.