Reading Archive
White-Out Conditions: Poetic Page, Scale, and Scope
It’s snowing again, and the world contracts, like my heel’s screws in the cold. The sky and ground reflect one another, white-gray, and the space between the two becomes more tangible, more intimate in the precipitation’s revelation of how far it has to go.
The Bookshelves of Others
I remember the bookshelf of my childhood home as very imposing and very maroon. It had the entire leather-bound World Book Encyclopedia collection, and I spent many afternoons cross-legged with one of the heavy volumes on my lap, reading entries on “China” or “homeostasis.”
Keeping the Faith: How Anne Lamott Can Save Your Life
Last summer, when my baby was four months old, we traveled to Israel to visit our families. My husband and I had been moving around the East Coast for several years--from Princeton to Brooklyn just before our trip. We were still figuring out our son’s schedule, nutritional needs, likes
The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: John Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley
Known for his simplistically powerful writing style, Steinbeck is perhaps known even more widely for his commitment to his hometown of Salinas, California. With this in mind, Steinbeck’s first short story cycle, The Pastures of Heaven, is an ideal entry point, as it is an early example of his
Bhanu Kapil: Hybridity and Disembodiment
Bhanu Kapil is a British-Indian writer concerned with migration, transformation, loss, and the hybrid text. In her slim, subversive books she considers bodies "at the limit of their particular life," and the embodied prose she fashions to depict them are strange, broken, and revelatory.
Empowerment can start in the kitchen: Eudora Welty’s DELTA WEDDING and THE OPTIMIST’S DAUGHTER
By focusing on women in a kitchen, Welty seems to shrug the mantles that keep her marginalized—regional and gendered—subverting expectations for canonical American literature as public or inhabited by important men.
Looking Back at Bright Lights, Big City
The New York Times was not impressed with Bright Lights, Big City when it first appeared in 1984. “A clever, breezy--and in the end, facile documentary,” was what they said.
Mary Gordon’s Spending: A Different Breed of Fantasy Lit
Several years back, I read a book that was unlike nearly any other I’d read before in one striking way: nothing particularly bad happened in it. The protagonist experienced minor internal struggles and dilemmas, but basically, everything came up roses. This felt like a major departure from Great Literature
Past the City Limit Sign: The Role of Rural in 2016 Books
What kinds of stories will emerge that focus on rural or city settings during a Trump presidency? Will the typical themes continue to be cemented or will variations become the norm?
Japanese Boy Band Saves the World: Postcolonial Masculinities in Final Fantasy XV
Only in a Japanese RPG can a boy band save the world from the empire and its demonic biotechnological army. In Final Fantasy XV, four male friends use the empire’s language of violence to decolonize the kingdom of darkness. Somewhere, Fanon’s ghost is drinking sake and smoking Peace cigarettes.