“I just went with my gut (and shut down my ego) and let the story tell itself”: An Interview with Mira Ptacin
Mira Ptacin’s new book is an exploration of Spiritualism’s history and its place in the current landscape of American faith practices. It also shows us, through the personal story Ptacin includes, how Spiritualism can help those still living and grieving after a loved one has died.
Reclamation of Authority in Heretic: An Interview with Jeanna Kadlec
In Heretic, Jeanna Kadlec writes a devastatingly thorough critique of evangelicalism as she records her spiritual journey out of fear and into reclaiming authority over her own life.
Ander Monson’s Essaying
Monson’s newest collection, out tomorrow, continues his exploration of essays and essaying, scrutinizing the “I”; playing with prose and white space on the page; and examining the nature of memory—all while suffusing his observations with the cultural elements he examines in earlier collections.
How Do You Fictionalize the Experience of Social Media?
Lauren Oyler’s debut novel is an audacious, mordant, and frequently hilarious sendup of internet culture at the turn of the decade, and a likely harbinger of how books about the internet will read in years to come.
Courage and Craft in Wanting: Women Writing About Desire
The contributors to Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters’s new anthology risk sharing their desires on the page in empowering personal essays that demonstrate astonishing courage, but also craft, making it a collection that reveals the relationship between wanting and body, mind, and heart, but also between wanting and voice.
Trans Panic and the Trans Literary Imagination
“In the small space between the ‘reasonable’ provocation of trans panic and death is where it’s like to live as a trans woman, where ‘the jury’ is a constant presence empowered to judge the worth of my life. And I had inadvertently introduced ‘the jury’ into my short story.”
Navigating Identity Across Continents in Vanessa A. Bee’s Home Bound
Vanessa A. Bee’s new memoir is story of an ambitious and bright young woman doing her best to navigate a complicated transcontinental existence.
A Ghost Among Ghost Stories
As Claire Cronin began writing about the horror movie, horror themes began to infiltrate her other work. She became both haunted by the subject matter and a haunting force within it. “I could not escape the spell,” Cronin writes, “and did not want to.”
“Those who are still around have an obligation to honor that tragedy but turn it into something else”: An Interview with Hua Hsu
Hua Hsu’s new memoir ends with his decision to go to therapy to attend to his irrational guilt over his friend’s death. It helps him come to the realization that what he wanted to write was not a eulogy but a “true account of the deceased,” one filled with
Making Space
Moving exposes the true quantity of our stuff: there’s too much. And what story do these objects, and the way in which they inhabit space, tell? Our possessions tell the stories of our changing bodies, our relationships, our jobs, the pandemic, the hobbies we’ve given up on, our privilege.