How Two Young Black Poets Are Making Sense of the World
The art of literacy may not be aggressive, but as Madison Petaway and Akilah Toney, two poets included in a recent New York Times feature, show, it can be assertive, assured, and bold.
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino by Julián Herbert
Herbert’s new collection is an ambitious, generous boon . . . his parody of Tarantino’s style and MacSweeney’s lively translation chart unmarked territory.
A Ghost Among Ghost Stories
As Claire Cronin began writing about the horror movie, horror themes began to infiltrate her other work. She became both haunted by the subject matter and a haunting force within it. “I could not escape the spell,” Cronin writes, “and did not want to.”
The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark
Best known for being a novelist, Muriel Spark was also a writer of short stories, many of which were ghostly. In her ghost stories, more often than not, Spark tests the old tropes by giving them a firm twist.
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
The Contradictions of Love in Love in a Fallen City
Eileen Chang’s stories portray love as having a dual nature, often experienced as hot or cold, and they reveal what can happen as people navigate these opposing forces
Invisible Ink by Patrick Modiano
What makes Modiano’s new novel such an enchanting read is its insistence on the importance of “those spaces where memory blurs into forgetting,” and its glyptic insights into the mechanisms by which forgetting offers up alternative chronologies . . .
What Do Our Monsters Say About Us?
A new collection of essays, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, offers readers a digestible and critical examination of the monstrous as a way to force us to consider the politics behind what we deem monstrous, and how a deeper understanding of what haunts us may lead to a new,
On Silence
When voicedness in art is tied to vulnerability in life, exposure—and not evasion, denial, and declarative muteness—ensures survival.
“We shouldn’t just turn inward when we walk”: An Interview with Kent Russell
Russell’s most recent book, chronicling a walk from the panhandle of Florida to the celestial city of Miami, comes to the conclusion that a walking journey should not only be a journey about the self, but also about how the self exists in a built environment.