Reading Archive
How Food Stars in Peter Mayle’s Memoir
Being a lover of food and memoirs, I have a dream of living in a foreign country, especially in Europe, for a year and writing about its food customs.
A Dream or No
It seems a pretty commonplace thing to say that great art results from heartbreak. There are countless examples in painting, music, and literature. Sometimes it’s a series of hardships that inspired an artist. Sometimes a direct line can be drawn back to a single event that brought about a
In Books We Trust: On Reading and Building Identities
For those of us who have found ourselves marginalized and rejected at some point in our lives because of who we are, books can offer a refuge from which we may attain some understanding of ourselves and the world.
The Ambiguous Epiphany
When I was a child growing up Catholic, the Feast of the Epiphany struck me as an afterthought. December was all about the thrilling run-up of Advent, characterized by candle lighting and singing at mass and by lists for Santa and chocolate-filled calendars at home. Finally there was the
Life Is Surreal Now: Get Used To It With César Aira’s THE MUSICAL BRAIN
I’m training early for the very real bizarro world of 2017 by reading César Aira. The Argentinian writer is one of the more prolific contemporary writers in contemporary Latin American letters with over eighty titles to his name.
Reading the Signs: Letter from Prague
For the past six months, I’ve been living in Prague—a small but fierce city in Central Europe where despite the cumulative oppressions of Nazi occupation and decades of isolation and communist rule, residents still maintain a well-developed sense of irony. Monitoring the (Anglophone) news from the self-exile of Prague
Unbelievable Girls
In The Girl On The Train, which recently hit paperback and movie theaters, the narrative reliability of Rachel, the book’s protagonist, becomes a question from the very first chapter. On the first evening of the book, we find her drinking canned gin and tonics on the subway on her
Leaps of Imagination: A Radical Act of Hope
This year, as we’ve seen, as we continue to see, is a dumpster fire. This is certainly not the first time you’ve read an end of the year article or blog post that begins with this now familiar lament.
To Dream
There’s nothing quite like a new baby for creating an obsession with all things sleep-related. My second daughter was born on December 6th, and in our dark bedroom at night, my brain is full of the same whirring calculations I remember from my older daughter’s first few weeks.
The Self-Policing Female Gaze in Emma Cline’s “The Girls”
Emma Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, is an unabashedly feminist novel that freely acknowledges the presence of patriarchal forces in our society.