The Black Aesthetic: Sexuality in Beyoncé’s Grammy Award Winning Lemonade
When Beyoncé dropped her masterpiece Lemonade last year, the world was abuzz. In her groundbreaking visual album, images of black femaleness manifest as not only sexually pleasing to imagine, but empowering to behold.
“Ten Pounds of Potatoes in a 10-Pound Bag”: An Interview with Eileen Pollack
Eileen Pollack’s stories are smart, big-hearted, and thought-provoking. We recently caught up via email to discuss the differences between novels and short stories—and how changes in society can help novels find their audiences.
Homesickness for Divided Places and Unknown Lands
When does a home become so hostile that you should consider leaving? Southern writers complicate clearly defined ideas of homesickness. In states where discrimination was legislated, hate crimes not prosecuted, and outsiders viewed with suspicion, nostalgia mixes with escapist impulses, love of landscape with horror at racial violence.
Earing the Clink of Chisels: An Imperfect Love Letter to Reading Literary Magazines
Every time I pause in front of a stack of lit mags at my house, I find myself flipping through one for a morsel. Gimme something good. I find myself re-reading things I’ve already read and feeling surprised by them again and again, as if the magazine keeps
Review: WHEREAS By Layli Long Soldier
Whereas Layli Long Soldier Graywolf; March 7, 2017 120 pp; $16 Buy: paperback Few Americans seem to know much about the Indian Occupation of Alcatraz, and fewer still are acquainted with the Occupation’s “Proclamation,” a masterful document that deploys the language, diction, and vocabulary of unfair treaties and paternalism
The Readers: Katy Waldman and the Uses of Wit
For the young, left-leaning reader, there are plenty of smart literary voices online to choose from, but I often find myself gravitating toward Katy Waldman, a staff writer at Slate whose literary criticism offers some of the freshest takes on books that you are likely to find anywhere.
Writers Descend on Washington, Promptly Resist
The literary community descended on Washington, DC last week for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ annual conference, and participants seized the opportunity to register their dissent with the current administration.
All the Lives I Marched For: Alana Massey’s Second Stories
I learned I am a Winona in a world made for Gwyneths. From the onset, Massey probes how society shapes or punishes women based on how we talk about or dismiss them. She writes with as much empathy about the women we mock as she does the women we
Round-Up: Court-Mandated Reading, Lyons Press, and ANNE OF GREEN GABLES
From an unusual court sentence to Anne of Green Gables, here’s the latest literary news.
The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: Taking the Temperature of Zora Neale Hurston’s Central Florida
Central Florida, sticky with humidity and restless with sea breeze, inspires the temperature of Hurston’s fiction and, in turn, the temperament of her characters. In her 1926 short story “Sweat,” Hurston chronicles the marriage of Delia, a washerwoman, and her unemployed, abusive husband Sykes.