Series Archive
Fiction Responding to Fiction: Edith Wharton and Alice Elliott Dark
“Roman Fever,” published by Edith Wharton in 1934 just three years before her death, is one of her short story masterpieces, and it is a story that has spawned many responses, including a modernized version by Alice Elliott Dark entitled “The Secret Spot.”
Throwback Thursday: Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
Though Bartleby, the Scrivener was published in 1853 and documents a world that’s vastly different from our own, it’s a strangely prescient text. The words and situations may be dated, but the sentiment feels familiar: it’s a horror story you’d expect to hear in our era of modernity.
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “The School Bus Driver” by Souvankham Thammavongsa
In "The School Bus Driver," Souvankham Thammavongsa asks not how a love triangle begins or ends, but how it can continue for so long.
NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA: Journey to the Center of an American Document, Query XIV
We’ve reached the section of Notes I dread the most. It’s also the query I’ve spent more time contemplating than any other. Here, at the center of the book, he makes his infamous case for slavery in his time.
Writing Trauma: Notes of Transcendence
Writers have the privilege—and power—of putting words to experience: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Writ in Water: Retraining the Distance Vision
There’s a passage in Donna Tartt’s celebrated The Goldfinch, almost a third of the way in, where our protagonist Theo Decker first touches down in Las Vegas. He is arriving for the first time in the West, and Tartt and her literary eye are too.
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “S Is for Silence” by Dacia Price
But that’s the difficulty—for the narrator and for us. We can’t answer the question what we did without also answering who we were.
The Best Poem I Read This Month: Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s “Wrapped In My Body I Dream”
Apogee Journal’s new folio “Queer History, Queer Now” acts as an “altar” to “reject the whitewashing, the profit-making, and political tokenizing that warps queer struggles and tragedies.” For this month, I decided to write regarding Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s “Wrapped In My Body I Dream.”
In Defense of Lingering: Ethan Canin’s “Pitch Memory”
As a teacher, I am occasionally accused of lingering. One poem by Emily Dickinson can fill an entire class. An hour isn’t too long to unpack the final page of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Carrion” by Savannah Johnston
When someone is faced with a life or death situation, principles that in quieter times appeared self-evident can become much more difficult to hold.