Longform Archive
The Trials of Migraineurs
I can understand why Roland Barthes, like many others, may have second-guessed the veracity of his migraines, this extreme—invisible—pain. Even with the blinds drawn, lying on my bed with a cold washcloth across my forehead, I wonder if what I am feeling is real.
Revisiting James Wright’s Shall We Gather at the River at Fifty-One
It is an understatement to say that Wright’s fourth collection had its work cut out for it, and it is no surprise the reception of the book was dramatically and passionately mixed.
Reading Know My Name and Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl
New memoirs by Chanel Miller and Jeannie Vanasco are about their rapes, but also about what it means to move through this world in a woman’s body. What has happened to Miller’s body and to Vanasco’s body connects them with millions of women globally and across time.
Trans Panic and the Trans Literary Imagination
“In the small space between the ‘reasonable’ provocation of trans panic and death is where it’s like to live as a trans woman, where ‘the jury’ is a constant presence empowered to judge the worth of my life. And I had inadvertently introduced ‘the jury’ into my short story.”
On Silence
When voicedness in art is tied to vulnerability in life, exposure—and not evasion, denial, and declarative muteness—ensures survival.
The Haunted Tenants of Henry James
Nearly half a century apart, Rumer Godden and E.F. Benson each moved into a house that could never seem to forget its first master, whose traces still filled its rooms. And so they made themselves at home as best they could—by writing ghost stories at Henry James’s desk.
The Poetry of Wislawa Szymborska and Alejandro Zambra’s Book Reviews
Wislawa Szymborska and Alejandro Zambra use the book review as a vehicle to convey something closer to poetry. They content themselves to leave each review with a feeling or mood, rather than an appraisal of a work.
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."
“Day to be recorded with sunbeams! Day of light and love!”: Longfellow and the Weather
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s weather reports document a lifelong fascination, even partnership, with the weather acting as the writer’s trusted, often fickle, companion and muse. The ritual documentation of the daily weather reveals Longfellow’s creative process and his failed attempts at separating his private life from the published prose and
Literary Silence in the Time of Pandemic
From the Black Death to the AIDS epidemic, the history of literature is suffused with gaps. Such a history is a record of mourning. It’s a record of all the things that cannot be spoken while living with upheaval and grief.