The Forming of a Self in Claudia Durastanti’s Strangers I Know
Claudia Durastanti’s English debut is a flame held up to the inexpressible self.
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams’s New Ways of Writing the Dying World
Richard Flanagan’s latest novel shows us how a writer can tell the story of our anxious, disturbed world in a meaningful way.
The True Cost of Labor
It is well understood by now the heavy toll that coal mining takes on geographic landscapes, their local populations, and the climate, despite practices of environmental remediation. There is also, however, another toll that mining takes—that all labor takes—on our individual bodies and lives.
A Feeling of Belonging in Bernardine Evaristo’s Manifesto
Evaristo’s memoir shows how one writer found her place in the world through storytelling, giving artists a roadmap to a deeper understanding of their own lives through the act of creating.
Mundanity Among Tragedy in How High We Go in the Dark
Published two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut novel is in some ways comforting, and in others a brutal reflection of our current moment. Through the course of the tragedies and mundanities explored within, every facet of every person’s life is altered; Nagamatsu explores how people handle
A Trick of the Light
Macbeth’s failures are failures to understand the interplay of perspective and perception in interpretation.
What is A Ghost in the Throat For?
Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s 2020 novel is a conversation between women, one of whom has the freedom to speak her long and impassioned set-piece in her famous keen but perilous little more, and another who is—by facing squarely that seductive, obliterating control that could empty room after room—creating herself.
Jana Prikryl, From the Fields of a Calendar
The poems that imagine photographs, the making and distribution of images to one or many friends, to strangers, revisit a figurative injection posed in Jana Prikryl’s first collection: a poem is not functional, a poem is something to be experienced in time.
The Fanfiction of A Little Life
Fanfiction pummels its readers with emotion, nearly overdosing us on joy, love, sex, and sorrow until we are left feeling exposed. It’s this rawness that fanfiction readers crave, and it’s this same rawness that Hanya Yanagihara brings to the literary world with her 2015 novel.
Activism in Exile
Gisèle Freund’s portraits, shown at the Maison des amis des livres in 1939, of several avant-garde writers and artists, are a collective portrait of a community, rather than a series of individuals. This group of intellectuals, however, would be scattered by the invasion of Paris by the Nazis one