Four Summer Books That Redefine the Beach Read
Who says a good beach read can’t also be a book that packs some punch? Here are four of this summer’s best.
“When You Read These Poems, They’re Yours”: An Interview With Leslie Harrison
Leslie Harrison’s poems are meditative and thoughtful, yet fleet-footed, quick to change direction. They show us a mind in motion, questing and questioning, wrestling with complex feelings and ideas.
The Roving Poets of Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College sprung up in the 1930s, near Asheville, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a short-lived school born in a time of crisis.
“Adventure of a Skier” and Calvino’s Theory of Lightness
Last week, the New Yorker released the first English translation of Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Skier,” which first appeared in the 1970 short story collection Difficult Loves. How does this “new” story fit into the themes and philosophical musings of the work as a whole?
Review: LIVING IN THE WEATHER OF THE WORLD by Richard Bausch
While not all of the fourteen stories in his new collection are a fair illustration of his ability, the balance demonstrates, once again, why he deserves a lasting place among American literary masters.
A Shining City on a Very Strange Hill
The idea that there is something unique, something exceptional about America, dates back to de Tocqueville and has firmly taken root in the nation’s literary and political imagination.
Elisa Albert’s After Birth and Getting My Body Back
Why did nobody tell me it would be this way? Elisa Albert’s narrator, Ari, seems to be asking throughout the novel After Birth. And why is no one around to help me through it now?
The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: Edith Wharton’s Design of New York City from the Inside Out
Divided into chapters focusing on various elements of the home, The Decoration of Houses illustrates that Wharton’s design of New York in her literature worked from the inside out, proving that a woman could appreciate both the interior beauty of a space, while living life freely beyond the walls
The Body Enchanted: Helen Oyeyemi and Consent
In core childhood narratives, elements of magic constantly compromise the bodily autonomy of women, from the prick of your finger on an enchanted spinning wheel to the loss of your voice in exchange for legs. I approached What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours with this narrative baggage in
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