Lauret Savoy’s Trace and the Search for Self-Meaning
If “home lies in ‘re-membering,’” then home is not a place, but an ongoing process. To traverse land is to trace the steps of your forebears, and to travel in search of heritage is to access our past by living fiercely in the present and finding what stories live
The Crane Wife’s Interrogation of the Self
CJ Hauser's interrogation of familial and cultural stories reveals as much about what it means to love someone else as it does about what it means to love a narrative. Ultimately, this leads her inward, turning the force of her questioning toward the unexpected shape of her own life
The Maternal Gothic and Maternal Ambition
"Now in my second pregnancy, I am turning to fiction, in particular a spate of recently published novels that portray the challenges of the postpartum period and early motherhood, to make sense of my attempts to hold together the identities of writer and mother."
“Girlhood is a much darker, more complex—more amazing—experience than what that association suggests”: An Interview with Melissa Febos
The essays of Febos’s new essay collection read less like a coming-of-age story than they do like a manifesto of all the ways girlhood takes a toll on a girl’s life, as well as of the cultural experience of being a woman.
Hybridity and Indigenous Identity in the Work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Betasamosake’s work exemplifies the brilliant possibilities of hybrid forms. Hybridity in genre allows Indigenous literature the freedom to shape-shift, to tell a story the best way it can be told, and to let that story live among its relatives, whether they be short story, memoir, or song.
Women’s Bodies and Constellations: Reflections from Life
The portrayal of women’s bodies in Irish literature, and in wider society, has created an impossible contradiction. Irish author and critic Sinéad Gleeson’s debut essay collection, chronicling life in the human body as it experiences illness, love, grief, and motherhood, however, marks a contribution that will widen our understanding
Searching for an American Epistemology in Lost in Summerland
Barrett Swanson’s essays rigorously interrogate the intersection between capitalism, masculinity, and the “gnawing sense of purposelessness” pervasive in our country’s psyche, while also adding an undeniable empathetic and interpersonal dimension that satisfies a reader’s desire for emotionally specific narrative intrigue.
Revisiting Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“When John le Carré died in December, I was drawn to revisit his 1974 espionage masterpiece. Its plotting was just as crystalline as I’d remembered, yet its enduring power didn’t lie, I realized, in its structure or entertainment value, but in the lucidity of its politics and moral investments.”
The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
Leonora Carrington’s novel revels in inconclusive ideas, surreal reimagining’s, and the peculiarities of human consciousness . . . The novel eludes any whiff of definitiveness, instead layering ideas and questions atop one another like blocks in a Jenga tower. Naturally, Carrington forces the reader to withdraw the first block.
Glimpsing Truth in the Impossible with Lynne Sharon Schwartz
The stories in Schwartz’s new collection offer us an invitation to the unknown in ourselves and in the world. Turn to the impossible, they tell us, and explore it. We cannot help but do so since, after all, the impossible is going to show up if we’re ready or