Reading Archive
The Readers: Ismail Muhammad and Encounters with Ghosts
Muhammad’s criticism is far-reaching, pulling together literature, politics, and religion in a quest to reckon with the black experience in modern America.
Finding Community in the Apocalypse
Apocalypse narratives so often focus on isolation—a person up against a wasteland or navigating groups of raiding cannibals—but what happens to the communities in these situations and what do the stories made from them show about the ebb and flow of disasters that weigh on any community.
Fiction Responding to Fiction: Jamaica Kincaid and Bret Anthony Johnston
Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Boy” is very much an homage as well as a companion piece to Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl.” The ways in which Johnston chose to mirror Kincaid’s piece show us the gender, class, and race equivalencies. Both Kincaid and Johnston are most interested in gender and the lessons
Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year
What is it about being in your early twenties that makes the world seem so overwhelmingly crowded and yet so desperately lonely all at once? There’s something bewitching about it, too, and melancholy.
The Self-Made Heir
Most Americans identify as “middle class,” though this is a reflection of mentality more than income. Economists define “middle income” households as those with incomes between 66% and 200% of the median household income. This means an annual income range of roughly $24,000 and $73,000 for one person. As
The Space Where God Used to Be
To say that Patricia Lockwood is a lapsed Catholic doesn’t begin to cover it. The poet and author of the memoir Priestdaddy is the daughter of a Catholic priest, either the beneficiary or the victim of a loophole.
In Praise of Unlikeable Characters
Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest begins, marvelously, with one of the best depictions of adolescent malaise I’ve ever read: the fifteen-year-old title character languishing on her porch in silent, miserable judgment (in “spasms of resentment”) while her mother knits, and gossips vacuously with a neighbor.
Reading Backwards
Finally recognizing this pattern has led me to an unconventional idea: we should teach literary survey courses backwards. And those of us who are no longer in lit classes (or who have steered clear of them altogether) should read that way ourselves.
Virtue and Liberation: The Literary Battle for the Mind of the American Mill Girl
Work, and the psychological impacts of work, are rarely represented in fiction, even though America has a rich literary history of labor narratives, particularly in the case of female writers, dating as far back as the mid-nineteenth century.
Obsessive Tactics in Patty Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
In Patty Yumi Cottrell's novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, the narrator Helen Moran investigates her adopted brother's suicide, an effort complicated by Helen's own profound alienation. Relentlessly interior, discursive and associative, the novel reads as the direct outcome of Helen's grief, an inner crisis she attempts to control