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.
Imagining the Anthropocene: What We Belong To and the Appeal of First-Person Plural
Symbolic as my singular action was, it was optimism in practice, opting for the choice to join a collective demonstration of resistance. These days, I’m far more likely to feel that “we” have ruined things than that “we” can affect the world to come.
Stories Strangely Told: Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands”
On quick glance then not much of "Hands" seems overtly experimental—the only oddity is that without George asking and without Wing disclosing, we somehow arrive at Wing's backstory.
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
Review: AN ARRANGEMENT OF SKIN by Anna Journey
For Anna Journey, it starts at the University of Houston, during the last year of her PhD program. Away in Richmond, Virginia, for a literary conference arranged by a close friend and mentor, Journey begins the affair that will end her seven-year relationship.
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 Black Aesthetic: Guns & Execution in TI’s Us or Else
In his latest album Us or Else: Letter to the System, T.I. exposes America's obsession with guns, questions the senseless killings of African American men by both blacks and whites, and the imminent need for social retribution.
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.
Fiction Responding to Fiction: James Thurber and Rivka Galchen
The narrator in Rivka Galchen's story "The Lost Order" is akin to Walter Mitty, the protagonist in James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," who sees himself as defined only in his dreams, not by the man he is in real life. They are both negative images.