Author Archive
The Social Constructs of Womanhood in I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness
The protagonist of Claire Vaye Watkins’s new novel refuses to perform motherhood, wifedom, and womanhood within the strictures of these words. But her refusal calls into question her very character, in others’ eyes and sometimes also her own. If she doesn’t fulfil these roles, what is she?
The Power of Women in Matrix
The protagonist of Lauren Groff’s new novel, Marie, watches her mother, grandmother, aunts, and queen exercise power before finally learning to wield it herself. Despite the book’s setting in medieval times, Marie’s plight feels similar to how women must take and assert power even now.
“I’ve always been drawn to writing about the body—our physical selves and how they reflect our inner lives”: An Interview with Kat Chow
Kat Chow’s debut memoir is very much about bodies. In it, Chow considers what could have been—not just in her life but in the generations before—particularly as what could have been relates to bodies and the ways in which they betray in life, as well as where they rest
The Foreboding Landscape in The Impudent Ones
In her debut novel, Marguerite Duras builds a visceral sense of foreboding through the beautiful and unnerving landscapes in the life of protagonist Maud Grant, who is both captivated by the land around her, and often swiftly shut off from it.
The Heartbreak of Bewilderness
Karen Tucker’s new novel vividly captures the opioid epidemic that has exploded across the nation, while reinforcing the humanity of people with substance use disorder and demonstrating how wrong blaming individuals for their illness is. In the end, blame will not save you from a broken heart.
We Wish You Luck’s Writerly Campus Novel
There is something thrilling about a campus novel, the way its borders close around a defined perimeter and an alluring clique. Caroline Zancan’s entry to the genre, set at a premier low-residency MFA program, pushes the campus novel into such an academic, writerly realm that it takes on the
The Many Narrative Layers of White Magic
In her new collection, out this week, Elissa Washuta builds essays that repudiate traditional structures, layering her own stories on existing forms as a means to examine the traumatic, defining moments of her life.
The Limits of Social Media in No One Is Talking About This
Patricia Lockwood’s first novel, out today, is unnervingly not hyperbolic in its lyric, humorous rendering of our social media obsessed world.
The Revealing Cultural Portrayal of Oligarchy
Scarlett Thomas’s most recent novel, out in the United States this week after initial publication in 2019 in the United Kingdom, is both absurdism and reality pared to its core, just as the girls in the novel pare themselves pound by pound at their no-name, British girls boarding school.
Reading, the Collective, and the Formation of the Self
Yiyun Li transcends the individual through the way she focuses so singularly on the I, moments of aloneness, and solitary memories, rather than on feelings she has from shared memories. Yu Hua, too, transcends the individual, though he does so by offering his experience as a way of representing