The Limits of Social Media in No One Is Talking About This
Patricia Lockwood’s first novel, out today, is unnervingly not hyperbolic in its lyric, humorous rendering of our social media obsessed world.
Silence and Memory in Everything Is Illuminated
By revolving the story around Augustine’s silent photograph, Foer draws on the elegiac nature inherent in photography while examining the limitations of representation.
“I see fiction as restoring to the world some of its actual complexity”: An Interview with Gish Jen
Like all of Gish Jen’s work, her most recent book is many things: a baseball novel, a bildungsroman, a protest novel. At the center are her characters—complicated, flawed, and likeable. We root for them all.
The Dreamlike Language of Apocalypse
By reading worlds of relentless darkness, repeatedly made new through the language of dreams and fables, we can maybe more deeply access empathy and hope for the world we’re living in.
Girlhood and Desire in The Lightness
The narrator of Emily Temple’s debut novel, Olivia, holds a deep desire to belong, to be loved, and to be touched—a desire that trumps her regard for safety, leading her to even give up her will to find her missing father.
I Will Always Be That
Throughout transition, I’ve often thought of my body as a poem––one whose semantics is a web of social relations I can’t quite parse, that no one can fully parse. More than a “receptacle,” my trans body necessarily relies on the creation of new subjective semantics.
Cooking as an Heirloom in Memorial
Early on in Washington’s new novel, Benson asks his partner’s mother for a story about her son. She says that stories are heirlooms, explaining that they are “a personal thing…You don’t ask for heirlooms. They’re just given to you.” She tells Benson this while she is cooking. But by
Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes
Guzel Yakhina’s 2015 novel is both a satisfying work of historical fiction as well as a moving portrait of a difficult period. Its most surprising element is also its most paradoxical. Perhaps in spite of Yakhina’s intentions, it posits a woman whose life is expanded and even enriched while
Finding Community in Isolation in Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood
In the conversations Sarah Menkedick has with new mothers, it becomes clear that the relationship between motherhood and fear is a cycle propelled by isolation and shame. Menkedick’s book itself, though, offers a sort of ad-hoc community of and for mothers.
Women Writing Food
The characters of Lara Williams’ and Margaret Atwood’s novels learn, eventually, to treat their love of food as a gift.