Killing the Messenger: A Dual Interview with Charles Baxter and Viet Thanh Nguyen on the Importance and the Stigma of Didactic (APIA) Fiction
Inside the craft-obsessed, time-warped fiction workshop where literary realism has reigned supreme forever, the Show-Don’t-Tell maxim serves an important function in critique.
Writing Through Silence: An Interview with Faizal Deen
Faizal Deen seeks to address the ways in which the cultural production of Caribbean populations in Canada—in particular, the work of poets—encourages us to rethink existing notions of diasporic identity.
The Affair’s Gender-Swapped “Madwoman in the Attic”
In the third season of The Affair, one of the Solloway children comes home excited to tell his mother that he’s participating in a musical version of Jane Eyre.
Review: ABANDON ME by Melissa Febos
Abandon me. The title is a straight-faced challenge. To her lover who she fears will. To two fathers who already have. To the reader who’s embarking on this story with her. Abandon me. Do the worst thing to me I can imagine. And I will save myself with story.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Hema and Kaushik”: Love Across Borders
When I first read Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri’s long short story “Hema and Kaushik,” I lived in suburban Mumbai, where I often sat in darkness by the window at night all by myself. In Koparkhairane, twenty-four miles from downtown Mumbai, power outages were common.
Is Life Imitating John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl?
Navigating through the hairpin twists and turns in le Carré novels is always fun and almost always challenging. In his Cold War novels, such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the plot is a subtle game of cat and mouse. The Little Drummer Girl was a change of pace.
Stories Strangely Told: Borges, Bad Art, and the Infinite Aleph
"The Aleph" by Jorge Luis Borges concerns, along with mirrors and the infinite: the demolition of a house, literary prizes, fragile egos, café lighting, the death of Beatriz Viterbo, and a few terrible stanzas by Carlos Argentino Daneri, a pompous and longwinded academic.
Tarot in the Time of Uncertainty
A friend I was visiting a while ago agreed to read tarot cards for me. I was a complete novice in the matter. The reading was about me picking up each card, describing what I saw, and then having my friend help me articulate my gut reaction to/analysis of
Weekly Round-Up: Howard Zinn, WALDEN, and Stephen King
From a book-banning bill to Stephen King's new collaboration, here's the latest literary news.
“There’s only one subject. That’s the trouble”: DeLillo and Saunders in 2017
The first paragraph I wrote after reading Saunders’s essay felt exhausting. Every sentence felt vague and hollow. But good: a feeling akin to my physical therapist standing beside me, correcting the form on my squats. Painful but good when I got it right.