Review: THE CHILDREN by Ann Leary
When I recently entered Ann Leary’s, The Good House, I found myself enjoying some of the quirkiest, most human, and authentically rendered company in Leary’s characters, each of which inspired me to get to know more of her work.
Good Bad Women: The Sea Witch
A band, made up of eight young Swedes playing steel drums, had set up just outside the bookshop where I work. I didn’t step out of the shop to watch them until, almost without realizing it, I was singing along.
The Best Poem I Read This Month: Nikki Wallschlaeger’s “Blues for A Bar So Low That It Became a Cage”
Nikki Wallschlaeger is the author of the collection Houses and the graphic chapbook I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel, two arrangements that undercut artifice and underline activation energies. This month, I dove into one of her new poems from the most recent incarnation of The Journal Petra.
“Why not now go towards the things I love?”: The Aftermath of Being Queer
Some part of me broke last Sunday. I kept scrolling this week through the news articles that listed the victims of the Orlando massacre, the pain in my heart growing with each name. It seems we’re being denied time and space to mourn.
Round-Up: Book Marks, PEN International, and BookCon 2016
From LitHub's new service to updates on the upcoming BookCon, here's the latest in literary news: Literary Hub has just announced the release of a new service, Book Marks, which is described as a “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”
Time and Opening Chapters: Gaining Trust
Lately I’ve been thinking about time in novels. How to manipulate it, whether it should be linear or nonlinear, and what that choice means for a story. I began to examine it more closely after a recent weekend novel workshop I took with Lauren Grodstein.
DIY: A Tiny Interview With Ruben Quesada
It's a little known secret that Ruben Quesada is quietly responsible for the promotion and community infrastructure that so many contemporary Latina/o writers enjoy today. As an editor, he plays a direct role in outlets such as Codex Journal, The Cossack Review, Cobalt Review, and Luna Luna Magazine.
Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
His voice a thin radio rasp, Neil Armstrong coaches Buzz Aldrin down the ladder of the Lunar Module. “It’s about a three footer,” he says of that last step to the chalky surface below. The second man on the moon leaps from the final rung and lands buoyantly.
The Veins of the Ocean and the Politics of Grief
Despite the foothold grief retains in our lives at large, its portrayals in our art are often one-size-fits-all. It isn’t simply a question of what is appropriate to grieve—the world provides no shortage of reasons for that—but whether on the television, over Facebook, or, most perplexingly, within literary fiction,
Review: SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN, YOU’LL SEE by Christos Ikonomou
Though Ikonomou’s characters are faced with Greece’s economic crisis, and the collection is beholden to particular circumstance, place, and time, Something Will Happen is not so particular as to be prohibitive. It’s spare. It’s intricate, full of heart and heft, and about the crisis only insofar as it enters