Series Archive

The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: The Rules of Reality in William Faulkner’s Fictional County

Author: | Categories: Series No comments
There is no conversation on literary regionalism without Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. The Mississippi-born author’s loyalty to his imagined landscape is perhaps what he is most known for.

Indies Elsewhere: Letra Muerta

Author: | Categories: Series No comments
The fight between digital and printed books is less a real rivalry and more of a taunting between siblings. Independent publishing houses like Letra Muerta in Venezuela create beautiful books that satisfy tactile desires but pay equally detailed attention in publishing interesting content regardless the format.

Stories Strangely Told: Big Want

Author: | Categories: Series No comments
The way we most often talk about it desire is an aspect of character. Which is all fine, really, until we slam into those desires so bullish in their insistency that no longer can we play like we own them.

Confronting Our Environmental Apocalypse: William Blake and the Imagination

Author: | Categories: Series No comments
William Blake possessed an erratic imagination that serves as a fascinating example of how a literary artist can forges new modes of expression in order to stand before the shifting reality in which they live.

Imagining the Anthropocene: The Floods of Derrick Austin’s Trouble the Water

Author: | Categories: Series No comments
Derrick Austin’s Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016) turns flooded ruins into relics devoted to floods, both physical and emotional. His debut collection of formally-driven, hermetic verse shapes physical and emotional overflows into precise devastation.

The Black Aesthetic: Teenage Angst and Grown Woman Insecurity in SZA’s Ctrl

Author: | Categories: Series No comments
SZA’s debut studio album, Ctrl, impresses fans with her lyrical honesty. In a lengthy and confessional letter to Drew Barrymore, SZA wrote how Drew’s movies Poison Ivy and Never Been Kissed shaped her and eased her anxiety “about being awkward and having crooked teeth.”

Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love

Author: | Categories: Series No comments
On September 28, 1972, Bambara publishes her first collection of short stories, Gorilla, My Love, chronicling the lives and perspectives of African American characters in both urban and rural settings. A New York Times reviewer praises the stories in the debut collection as “tough, violent, funny, and frantically relevant.”

Fiction Responding to Fiction: Jamaica Kincaid and Bret Anthony Johnston

Author: | Categories: Reading, Series No comments
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

Indies Elsewhere: Laguna Libros

Author: | Categories: Series No comments
Laguna Libros started as a small publisher of art books and has become a well-established press that has made a strong impact in the international publishing scene by remaining nimble, smart, and curious.

The Readers: Scott Esposito and the Redemptive Powers of Translation

Author: | Categories: Series No comments
We misunderstand each other and we pull away. Even within one language like English, words mean different things to different people, and we gravitate towards those who use this meaning-making technology as we do. Some people struggle to differentiate between systemic issues and issues of personality. The quest for