Author Archive
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.
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 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
“The characters in the novel are shameless about their bodies”: An Interview with K-Ming Chang
Part myth, part bildungsroman, part queer love story with a lyric, fabulist delivery, Chang’s debut novel, out today, is a novel of the body—its mundane functions, its power to create life, the ways in which it decays—as well as what can be done to a body—by war, from domestic
Reading World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
Through her celebration of nature—and herself—Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores how it connects her to family and has played a role in building her own. Ultimately, she urges, we should wonder while we can, and do better to protect that which we can wonder at before we lose it completely.
The Danger and Loneliness of Passing
Brit Bennett’s recently published novel and Nella Larsen’s classic reveal the danger—and loneliness—of a black woman passing for white in the early 1900s and the 1990s. Passing affords the freedoms and opportunities for reinvention that whiteness allows for, but this comes at a terrible cost.
“I Wanted to Create Some New Legends for Appalachian Women”: An Interview with Amy Jo Burns
Burns’s new novel resurrects the experience of women in Appalachia rather than letting their stories be buried while their husbands’s live on.
The Narrative of Breast Cancer
Anne Boyer joins others, like Susan Sontag, Nina Riggs, Audre Lorde, and Kathy Acker, who push against and question the breast cancer narrative conventions.
The Landscape of Memory
For most of us, memory supplies meaning and connection to our past selves, our place of origin, a greater world. Memory gives us meaning.