“I Wanted to Create Some New Legends for Appalachian Women”: An Interview with Amy Jo Burns

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Burns’s new novel resurrects the experience of women in Appalachia rather than letting their stories be buried while their husbands’s live on.

The Many Voices of Memory in The Magical Language of Others

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While a memoir can often feel myopic or even self-indulgent, Koh’s presents clearly the truth that is tucked between the pages of all memoirs—that all of us are pieced together by a multitude of stories told to us and that we, in turn, tell to others.

Forensic Architecture and César Aira’s Ghosts

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In essence, Aira says that architecture is a language, a manifestation of our unconscious into reality; it is a diorama of our humanity, rendered in miniature form, shaped by our dreams. So what should we make of the dreams of architects who create buildings of inequity?

“I am a wanderer”: An Interview with Susan Straight

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Straight’s new memoir is part family history, part memoir, part love letter to her daughters, part US history, part reading list, and partly a discussion of the amorphous concept of the heroine’s journey. Like its author, the book is never one thing; it rests on opposite ends of various

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

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In her new memoir, Machado tells a story of abuse that often goes unrecognized, exploring what happens when we don’t have ready narrative models for our experiences.

Writing Grief

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As Naja Marie Aidt goes about the Herculean effort of wrestling with her son’s death, she utilizes a remarkable variety of forms; her grief is expressed not only through the substance of her words, but through the structure of her text.

Breathe: A Letter to My Sons by Imani Perry

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Perry, in the legacy of James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Kiese Laymon, employs the epistolary form to craft an intimate meditation on the fears, hopes, and responsibilities of raising two Black boys in America.

The Lives of Others in Tales of Two Londons: Stories from a Fractured City

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What is to be made of the myriad tales collected in this anthology, some of them connected by geographical proximity and nothing more? Part of the effect is to render the familiar unfamiliar.

“I no longer think the driving force of books is to tell everyone that everything will get better”: An Interview with Sarah Rose Etter

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Etter joins a legacy of women writers who depict the horror of women’s experiences.

“Poetry has great work to do”: An Interview with Carolyn Forché

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The poems in Forché’s 1981 collection relate the violence and the normalization of cruelty that she witnessed in El Salvador—a subject she also approaches in her recent memoir—in obliquely crushing, brutal language.