Reading Archive
Need and Greed in Fields and Mansions
Driving through southern fields makes visible one of the persistent paradoxes of American production: the coexistence of excess and need. Jean Toomer, writing in 1923, illustrates the disconnect between agricultural abundance and personal lack in his poem “Harvest Song.”
East and West: What Tagore Loved to Eat
Over the past several months, I have steeped myself in Tagore, trying to imbibe his songs and poetry and to know him as a man. As a Nobel Prize winner and a towering literary figure, Tagore is a cultural icon of Bengal. I have sought his soul and prided
Scaffolding
As people who will die someday, and whose loved ones will die someday, we all live with at least one large dark truth from which we often try to avert our gazes. This tension—knowing a thing, but living as far away from that knowledge as possible—surfaces in literature too.
With Those We Love Alive and a Different Way to Write a Short Story
The medium we present something on, often defines the kinds of stories we can tell and how we tell them. In the digital age, With Those We Love Alive shows us another way to write a story even if its written on our skin.
On Scab-Picking and Other Such Transformations
At the heart of it, the simple matter of learning about the things you can’t control and struggling to control the ones you can come in just as many forms as those things themselves.
Serious Subjects
I learned that I could respond to poetry with a thousand times a thousand micro-emotions. I soon began to wonder what I even meant by “serious” poetry, and what constituted a poem’s artfulness. I reflected upon the fact that those initial ideas were narrow, even elitist, and they are
Rachel Cusk and the Unbearable Lightness of Being
When I was pregnant, I felt for the first time in my life that I came first. Suddenly, my needs and desires weren’t mere whims; in the gestation of another being, they mattered tremendously. When this being was extracted from my body, I still felt it crucial to put
I Don’t Need to Read LOLITA, Because I’ve Read THE LOVER
I am not saying Lolita is a bad book, or that its fans or Nabokov are complicit in sexism; just that it’s not a story I care about delving into. I always thought this was because I wasn’t open-minded enough as a reader—until I met The Lover, by Marguerite
The Zen Leopard
Lately, it seems mindfulness is next to godliness. For many, concentrating time on a rich inner life is an antidote for overstimulation—the meditation smart phone app serving as a one-swipe pharmacy for this modern malady.
Small-Town Life: Polish Edition
It’s obvious on the page that Springer has fallen in love with the town, with its story. Some chapters read like a brochure for a place that no longer exists.