Reading Archive
Begin Again: On Endings in Nonfiction
Talking, or writing, about endings is hard—whether it’s the end of a marriage, the end of a life, or the end of a book (lest one spoil the conclusion). Life rarely offers sudden and definitive endings or epiphanic conclusions. Rather, events leading up to the end seem to be
Good Little Girls
What happens when young women try to fight against the urge to be good and undisruptive?
The High-Low Collapse in Dana Ward’s The Crisis of Infinite Worlds
Dana Ward’s collection is the very picture of postmodern poetry: compulsively self-conscious and concerned with the act of writing as much as with the subject of his writing.
Flickerings of an Innermost Flame: A Hundred Years of the Hogarth Press
In a 1917 letter to a family friend, Virginia Woolf announced a new endeavor with her husband, Leonard: “We have bought our Press! We don’t know how to work it, but now I must find some young novelists or poets. Do you know any?”
Takin’ It to the Streets
It only seems natural to want a temporary escape from our current state of affairs, and as an avid writer and reader, books seems like the obvious answer. But is it the correct one?
Sappho’s Tweets: A New Kind of Fragment
What does it mean for an ancient poet and her translator—both women—to be taking up this kind of space in our Twitter timelines?
Mindfulness and Rainer Maria Rilke
Often cited as self-help before the genre existed, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet contain much wisdom in few pages.
Kissing Walt Whitman
I saw all the things we consider “Whitmanesque”: the energy, the exuberance, the empathy. And one thing that my mother’s serene portrait had not prepared me for—the eroticism.
“The Zero Meter Diving Team” and the Risks of Obedience
I’ve long been a well-behaved person, and as an adult I have come to suspect that this isn’t one of my more admirable traits. This suspicion, I think, is part of what draws me so intensely to Jim Shepard’s wonderful heartbreak of a story “The Zero-Meter Diving Team."
Disrupting Silicon Valley in Janice Lobo Sapigao’s microchips for millions
In her debut collection microchips for millions, Janice Lobo Sapigao disrupts Silicon Valley through poetry, revealing the structural violence that is encoded into it.