Review: A WOMAN OF PROPERTY by Robyn Schiff
A new kind of writing about motherhood may be emerging. Rachel Zucker's and Arielle Greenberg's Home/Birth, Brenda Shaughnessy's Our Andromeda, Eula Biss's On Immunity, and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, for example, are conscious in a contemporary way about new possibilities of childbearing and parenting, about choices and agency, yet
The Impact of Expat Writers in Uncertain Times: Patrick Leigh Fermor
The year was 1944. Special Operations Executive officer Patrick “Paddy” Leigh Fermor, having spent a year in Cairo, returned to the occupied island of Crete to kidnap a German general. The incident would come to be known as the Kidnap, or Abduction, of General Kreipe.
Summer Reading in the Family Tree
The house in Manomet was purchased in the 1950s by my husband’s paternal grandparents. It’s a sweet, small place—bare bones and un-winterized, thus uninhabitable come October. Each day during my stay, I can’t help but spend some time examining the little library.
With Late Capitalism Hovering in the Background: In Conversation with Wendy Xu and Jesse Hlebo
“We live in a late-capitalist situation where if something is not worth money then culture says it’s not worth anything at all.”
“A Landing Spot for My Word-Sounds”: An Interview with Naoko Fujimoto
Naoko Fujimoto’s lyrical, musical poems are written across distances—whether it’s the personal distance between the poet and the personas she adopts, or the psychological distance of writing from the U.S. about the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami.
Poetry, Art, and Education in Alabama’s Prisons
Poet and educator Kyes Stevens believes we should all make space for human beings to be the beautiful, rich, complicated, messy folks that we are. Art and poetry help provide this space for all people, and Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project helps provide this space for prisoners.
Round-Up: Writers Address the Next President, J.K. Rowlng’s New eBooks, and the New PEN/Nabokov Award
From PEN America's new award to a new Harry Potter ebook series, here are last week's biggest literary headlines.
As From My Window I Sometimes Glance
Lately, I spend a lot of time gazing out my window. In quiet moments with a cup of coffee and the whole day unspooling before me, I sit on the ledge looking at the street below and think of Alicia Ostriker’s poem, August Morning, Upper Broadway.
Accessing Social History through Books
The required reading for the entering undergraduate class the year I enrolled was Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James W. Loewen. I didn’t read it.
Mark Twain and Literary Caves
On road trips, I’ve taken to stopping at caves. Cave systems may be the last undiscovered regions on earth, but I go to the tourist ones, the long-since-discovered and heavily trampled ones, the kind that only require a jacket and sneakers, not a hard hat, Coleman Lantern, or rope.