Series Archive

The Black Aesthetic: Salvation and Deliverance in Jimi Hendrix’s “Hear My Train A Comin'” and “Purple Haze”

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Forty-seven years ago, in the month of September, the legendary blues rock singer Jimi Hendrix died. When Hendrix passed away suddenly from an unintentional drug overdose at the age of twenty-seven, he was at the peak of his musical career.

Fiction Responding to Fiction: Katherine Mansfield and Ali Smith

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Could there be a better way to pay homage to an author than to include the writer as a character in the fiction? In Ali Smith’s story “The Ex-Wife,” included in her collection Public Library and Other Stories, the writer Katherine Mansfield is the other woman.

Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

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In September of 1954, two hundred and fifty years after castaway Alexander Selkirk gazed upon his own desert island, William Golding publishes Lord of the Flies about a group of British schoolboys stranded on a tropical island.

Imagining the Anthropocene: The Corporeal Poetics of Marianne Boruch’s Cadaver, Speak

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In her book Cadaver, Speak, Boruch engages in a corporeal self-study through figure drawing, art history, and medical anatomy. From inside her own “bonehouse,” Boruch builds a poetics of embodiment, suturing her firsthand observation to the cultural paradigms that have marked our language.

Stories Strangely Told: Stories That Break Their Molds

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There are stories that break from patterns, and stories that pull so hard at their stitching that they unravel themselves in the process.

The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: The Power of Repeated Setting and Statement in August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle”

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For August Wilson, his hometown of Pittsburgh was the setting for nine of his ten plays; his complete oeuvre thus earning the moniker “The Pittsburgh Cycle.” Each play is set in a different decade, allowing Wilson to examine the black experience across different times, but in the same place.

Confronting Our Environmental Apocalypse: Beauty and the Japanese Tradition

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One of the many things I have found so moving and gripping about classical Japanese literature is how concrete the worldview is. Here is a sensibility that is deeply enmeshed in the world and looks for beauty in the imperfections of nature, in the corrosive effects of time.

Imagining the Anthropocene: Danez Smith’s “summer, somewhere”

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Danez Smith’s second book of poems, Don’t Call Us Dead, takes up the project of rehumanizing black lives, reshaping lament into forward-looking prophecy. The collection’s opening epic poem, “summer, somewhere,” acts as a book of re-creation, turning premature mortality into a revived, embodied love drawn from the earth itself.

Indies Elsewhere: Tragaluz

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It is no easy feat to nurture a literary project while far away from the epicenter of publishing activity, yet Tragaluz has made it work in a spectacular manner.

The Black Aesthetic: God, Materialism, and Prosperity in Meek Mill’s Wins & Losses

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Meek Mill’s latest album Wins & Losses confronts what it means to be a young black American. With songs such as “Young Black America,” Meek questions whether the black church has turned its back on the black youth.