“Heat and Rage and the Sweet Stink of Broken Flowers”: Place Informs Character in Bastard out of Carolina
In Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, home is both cultivated and destroyed alongside characters that hold landscape against their bodies. Home is a beating heart. It’s a branding. Like the hungry, tenacious families Allison creates, her landscapes are just as alive and wanting.
The Real Surrealism of Robert Desnos
Excommunicated from the movement by Andre Breton, Desnos is at once an artist who troubles the traditional narrative of surrealism and who embodies most wholly some of its most important tenets.
On Accidental Books
Books, even books writers didn’t know they were writing, are born from discipline, by people who took their ideas seriously, even before they amounted to anything.
The Readers: Cynthia Ozick and Backward Glances
It seems fitting that the title of Ozick’s latest book reads like a list or exercise in taxonomy: the book is rampant with clear-eyed perceptions and smooth digs, classic wit and a keen interest in dividing and categorizing, in speaking to the differences between things.
What Is Poetry?
The question arises often in bookstore readings and writing workshops, cultural commentary and book clubs, and yet the answers remain slippery and incomplete, sometimes biased toward a particular aesthetic, other times umbrella-ed into compromising vagaries, all of which equally frustrate the long-haul poet and the beginning reader.
Iconography of a Disaster: Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl
Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, about the nuclear reactor meltdown at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, opens with Lyudmilla Ignatenko, whose husband Vasily was one of the first firefighters to respond to the scene.
Stories Without Women
Men Without Women is a familiar, easily identifiable, and oddly comforting book for the Murakami reader, privileging the emotional landscape of lonely Japanese men through scaffolding characterization, personal idiosyncrasy, and monkey-wrench narratives.
Imprint(ing)s: An Interview With William Kemp of words(on)pages
William Kemp is a founding editor at Toronto-based words(on)pages, an organization that self-describes as one “that supports, promotes, and engages emerging writers in Canada through workshops, publications, a prize, and a reading series.”
Review: OPTION B: FACING ADVERSITY, BUILDING RESILIENCE, AND FINDING JOY by Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant
Indeed, the theme of moving on—but not necessarily past—tragedy is her central message here.
Process and Place: An Interview With Jessie Chaffee
I attended Jessie Chaffee’s reading at DC’s Politics & Prose, where she read from her debut novel Florence in Ecstasy (Unnamed Press, May 2017). Afterward we decided to extend our conversation about her process and the role of place in her work into an interview.