Harm Was Done: Subversive Sympathy in Anakana Schofield’s MARTIN JOHN
In Martin John, Anakana Schofield presents us with a sexual deviant hiding out in London having fled the West of Ireland. Where does this novel sit in relation to such works as Nabokov's Lolita and A.M. Homes' The End of Alice, and what role do such works serve?
S-TOWN and the “Daunting Exercise” of True Crime
Less than forty-eight hours after Serial and This American Life released their new true crime podcast, I got a text message from a friend about it. “S-Town podcast. Listen immediately. All seven episodes.”
Narrative and Anti-Narrative in the Poetry of Sexual Assault
In the brief back-cover description of Lauren Berry’s The Lifting Dress, we read: “Set in a feverish swamp town in Florida, The Lifting Dress enters the life of a teenage girl the day after she has been raped.”
Round-Up: Shakespeare, Joe Biden, and North Korean Fiction
From a newly discovered source of Shakespeare scholarship to a collection of North Korean short stories, here's the latest literary news.
Unhaunting the Small Town Narrative in NIGHT IN THE WOODS
What makes up the American small-town identity feels solidified in the cultural consciousness, but that depiction is a veneer that needs interrogation. The game Night in the Worlds and novel Universal Harvester comes at a time to do just that and rehabilitate that archetypal image.
Confronting Our Environmental Apocalypse: The Absurd
In thinking about climate change, we can take a lesson from those masters of the absurd—Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett—to conjure uncanny and grotesque situations that, more than a realistic or scientific view, may come closer to expressing the contradictions that make up our world.
This Spring’s Best Books
This spring, let your mind and heart wander where your feet might not take you—to far-off lands, to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and to the whiskey-making mountains of Appalachia—without ever leaving your bedroom. Here are our favorite picks for this season’s latest reads.
Buffy Versus Dracula
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which just celebrated its twentieth anniversary, is remembered for its campy, sometimes silly, iconic vampire lore. And yet, while watching it as it aired, it never occurred to me that the classic Prince of Darkness—Dracula—might appear.
Love in the Time of Tear Gas: THE NIX’s Wild Literary Style Crashes Epically Against Its Vision of Our Diminishing Culture
The most distinctive trait of novels like The Nix is the ensemble, and the guiding principle is a recognizably American one: the bigger, the better.
Review: THE WIDOW’S GUIDE TO EDIBLE MUSHROOMS by Chauna Craig
Most of the stories in The Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms, Chauna Craig’s debut collection, are set in the American West, centered on characters who often identify closely with their geography ... And while Craig convincingly portrays a range of characters, her work is particularly striking when she writes