Katie Kitamura’s Explorations of Separation
Katie Kitamura’s most recent novels are like mirror images: though their titles suggest that their subjects are opposing themes—separation in one and intimacy in the other—both novels show how our lives are bound up in the lives of others, including those from whom we wish to separate.
Memory and Selfhood in Confessions
In his remarkable 2008 novella, Rabee Jaber merges the cinematic image and affective response to investigate the paradox of memory and imagination, the polarization of Beirut, and the irretrievably fractured sense of self left behind by the thousands of disappeared civilians during the Lebanese Civil War.
The Power of Oral Stories in The Distant Marvels
Keeping the stories, the myths, the facts, and the losses of the Cuban people alive is important. Telling these stories is an act of active resistance against the washing away of the Cuban people who have toiled under colonizers and dictators.
Flyover Country
Michael Martone teaches the flown-over writer to treat the Midwestern setting with dignity and curiosity, allowing the landscape to help characters tell their stories.
Fear and Selfishness in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
In Mariana Enriquez’s most recently translated story collection, people are afraid: afraid of poverty, afraid of solitude, afraid of confronting the grotesqueness of their own mistakes. One of the strings binding the collection is that again and again fear pushes the characters into committing craven acts of selfishness.
The Chorus of There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis
The new anthology, edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman, documents last summer’s period of quarantine and protest, bewilderment and commitment. Over the pages, the resonances build like voices gathered in a street singing justice songs.
Homeland Elegies and America’s Liberal Project
Ayad Akhtar poses a challenge to liberal consensus not by denying the existence of America’s foundational inequalities along lines of race, class, and gender, but by questioning whether the liberal project of advancement through representation is capable of catalyzing the structural changes necessary to address them.
From “I” to “We” in Winter and Refugia
Collections by Sarah Vap and Kyce Bello, united in their simultaneous gaze on mothering and our ongoing human-created climate emergency, show us that dissolution of the individual self is inevitable and necessary— not only in motherhood, but also as we face the climate crisis.
“Sometimes the poems know things that we don’t know ourselves”: An Interview with Jay Deshpande
Recognizing the ephemerality of their wisdoms, Deshpande allows his poems to exist as monuments to themselves, that we might return to them in the future and experience their lessons anew.
The Ghosts of the Unseen in The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You
Maurice Carlos Ruffin writes about fathers trying to reach their sons, about peoples recently released from prison, about fathers with dead daughters, about people experiencing homelessness, showing the erasure that they feel by writing about these unseen, and about the ghosts that try to reach them.