“Mapping out the Moves”: An Interview With Poet and Translator Derick Mattern
Derick Mattern is an accomplished poet and translator of Turkish poetry. I spoke with him about his approach to translation, why he believes that all poets should translate, and how he wanted his time in Turkey to be very Turkish.
Confronting Our Environmental Apocalypse: Climate Change and the New Romanticism
Last year Amitav Ghosh asked: where are the novels of climate change? Arguing that a limited sense of reality prevents us from accepting the truly uncanny threat that is climate change, Ghosh urges writers to be imaginatively bold and dynamic, and calls for a revival of Romanticism.
Being Seen: Latinx and Queer Visibility at Writing Conferences
Visibility isn’t a vague term. You either see Latinx and Queer writers or you don’t. I don’t want to believe that literary conferences deliberately exclude writers, but I do believe that an oversight is made when a conference planning committee doesn’t try to represent every aspect of the literary
Imagining the Anthropocene: Aracelis Girmay’s The Black Maria
The Black Maria, Aracelis Girmay’s intricate epic of black survival, enraptures the reader in a gaze that looks simultaneously backward and forward, toward past and future that are impossible to see yet crucial to imagine.
Insights into Celebrity Humanitarianism from Zadie Smith’s SWING TIME
It’s not novel for celebrities to dip their toes into humanitarian waters. Actor Danny Kaye was named the first UNICEF ambassador-at-large in 1954, a full two decades before Angelina Jolie was even born. The trope of the well-meaning but clueless celebrity do-gooder is so entrenched that it’s become easy
Feminism and Tillie Olsen’s SILENCES
Though Tillie Olsen published very little in her lifetime, her body of work had a great impact on the women’s movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. She was a champion of underrepresented writers. Olsen’s book, SILENCES, became a classic feminist text, and her works of fiction were met with
Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”
The sickly and nightmare-plagued Lovecraft shows an inclination toward the sciences as a child, but his passion for literature emerges in his early adulthood. At thirty-seven, the master of cosmic horror publishes his genre-defining story “The Call of Cthulhu” in the February 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Weird
Round-Up: Samuel French, LeVar Burton, and Philip Pullman
From an iconic bookstore closure to Philip Pullman's big announcement, here's the latest literary news.
On Kindness and Barbarians
Like many people, I’ve been thinking about the past few years a lot lately. Instead of looking at political events, I’ve been looking at stories and movies. Mostly I’ve been thinking about Wes Anderson and Stefan Zweig.
This is Normal: Reading Evil in the Everyday
On Twitter, people keep saying this “isn’t normal.” In this story, the villain is an exception to the rule of normalcy. Maybe, I thought, that story is easier to tell than the real one.