“Becoming A Parent Made Me A Ruthless Editor of My Own Work”: An Interview with Elizabeth Onusko
Elizabeth Onusko’s poems are sharp-edged, sometimes bleak, but also very funny; they feel timeless, but also of the moment in their portrayal of the complicated emotions surrounding infertility, pregnancy and impending parenthood. We caught up to talk writing, editing, parenting, and how that third activity reshapes the other two.
Beyond Trump’s Wall: Immigrant Literature in Washington, D.C.
Today, one in seven Washingtonians are immigrants, which has shaped literary trends and artistic output.
Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for Sherman Alexie’s “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”
Alexie’s short story is first published in the New Yorker on April 21. The story’s protagonist is Jackson Jackson, a member of the Spokane tribe and a homeless alcoholic, who tracks his twenty-four-hour mission to redeem his grandmother’s stolen powwow regalia from a Seattle pawn shop.
For the (Physical) Love of Books
A few weeks ago, I found myself in a public state of lust. My object of desire? There before me, in a display fit for a museum, was a cloth-bound sketchbook of Ireland with “78 pages of watercolors by ‘Miss Collis,’ circa 1890.” I loved it. I wanted it.
The Arc of Joan Didion and Annie Dillard
In my mind, Joan Didion and Annie Dillard are linked, two sides to the same coin, one the yin to the other’s yang. This is unfair to both women.
Imagining the Anthropocene: Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior”
Lorine Niedecker’s poem “Lake Superior” cracks open the human history of its eponymous source. Its thirteen fragments splice together geologic details, explorers’ diaries, and firsthand observations to trace white settlers’ incursions into “America’s / Northwest.”
Round-Up: Amazon, THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK, and a Missing Library Book
From Amazon's move into the Middle East to a long-overdue library book, here's the latest literary news.
Bodies in “The Bloody Chamber”
When stories transport me, they usually do it inside a character’s body, and the farther afield the story is taking me, the more important the physical details of the characters’ experiences become.
Rural Pride in the Walleye Capital of the World: Emily Fridlund’s HISTORY OF WOLVES
Loose River is a town where the two key descriptions of Christmastime are “competing nativity scenes” and the “strings of colored lights up and down Main Street.” Linda, the protagonist, thinks in terms of natural geography: her friend lives “in a trailer three lakes over.”
The Chapter in THE SECOND SEX Men Should Read
Up until recently, I’d always stacked Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex on the same mental shelf as War and Peace and In Search of Lost Time—books unwieldy in size and densely written, requiring a nearly extinct attention span.