Review: LABOR OF LOVE: THE INVENTION OF DATING by Moira Weigel
Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating Moira Weigel Farrar, Strass and Giroux, 2016 304 pp; $26 Buy: hardcover | eBook Reviewed by Andrew McKernan What are you doing tonight? We should Netflix and chill. Even without receiving that exact text, one knows the purpose, and the posture. Why
Throwback Thursday: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
A collection of intricately linked yet inherently stand-alone stories, the central plotline of The Martian Chronicles follows the semi-allegorical colonization of Mars by the Americans, and documents the removal of the planet from the aboriginal Martians.
Adding Taste to Food Writing
I remember the smells from my mother’s cooking that wafted in the breeze as I played as a young boy growing up in India’s heartland. I remember the smell of mustard seeds that went pop pop pop in hot mustard oil in a kadhai.
Creepy Pasta and Michael Helm’s AFTER JAMES
Part ghost story and part detective novel, After James by Michael Helm is a novel of ideas descended from creepy pasta, or urban legends from the Internet.
John Freely and a New Generation of Expats
The era of the carefree expat has passed. This is not to say that being an expat is impossible today, but to say that with tightening visa requirements and economic downturns, staying abroad after initially being bitten by that desire either requires outright deliberation or hefty doses of chance.
The Compass Points to Julie Marie Wade for Lyric Nonfiction
Catechism: A Love Story is not a romantic tale. It’s the story of the bride who ran away and the future bride who helped her. Author Julie Marie Wade, Lambda Literary Award winner for her memoir Without: Poems, doesn’t romanticize about finding love in this book-length lyric essay.
“Honey, I rode every pig track here to yonder”: Bookmobiles in Southern Appalachia
Madison County, North Carolina contains roughly 450 square miles of the oldest mountains in the world, with sharply pitched forested slopes, grassy balds, rocky ridges, and swift creeks typical of the Southern Appalachian highlands.
An Angel Choir, Titans of Industry, and a Writers’ Festival: Western New York’s Chautauqua Institution
When I arrive in early June to teach at the Writer’s Festival, the Chautauqua Institution is a ghost town. The lake laps against the shoreline and the proliferation of white wicker chairs on the historic Athenaeum hotel veranda are mostly empty.
Round-Up: Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, Cormac McCarthy, and Neil Gaiman
From Cormac McCarthy's death hoax to the new Neil Gaiman book, here's this week's biggest literary news:
On Intimacy: Elena Ferrante & Stacey D’Erasmo
It seems as though people do not want to believe that fiction can be intimate—that is: detailed, personal, private, sacred, something with which readers feel closely acquainted or familiar. It is especially surprising if it is also broad, and that one book can accomplish both apparently astounds reviewers.