Posts by author
Kyle Williams
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Punk Magic
Over at Hazlitt, Tobias Carroll writes about the intersection of punk and magic in various fictional works, from The Insides by Jeremy P. Bushnell to the Hellblazer comics and Buffy the Vampire Slayer—a surprisingly varied history of what might, at first,…
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To Speak Unsatisfactorily
To memorialize a tragedy, one must inscribe unmistakable significance into reticent materials, attempting to curb the natural processes of forgetting and obsolescence. For The Nation, Becca Rothfeld writes about W.G. Sebald, author of The Emigrants, among others, and his obsession with…
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The Pleasure of Recognition
Ferrante’s novels about women like Lila and Lenu are a potent reminder that working-class women’s perspectives are out there, even if we can’t always hear each other, even if we’re sometimes embarrassed and alone, even if we feel exasperated by…
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Sex and Social Media
Over at the New York Review of Books, Zoë Heller writes about American Girls by Nancy Jo Sales and Girls and Sex by Peggy Orenstein: how each book deals with the concepts of female “hotness” and body positivity in the social…
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Treatment and Healing
Treatment sometimes looks like hospitalization in an overcrowded psych ward and medication that can dissolve personality. Over at American Short Fiction, Jenna Kahn writes about the depiction of mental illness in literature—as found particularly in “The Depressed Person” by David…
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The Fire Every Time
“Will the world my pains deride forever?” At Lit Hub, Precious Rasheeda Muhammad traces the lineage of black protest writing from W.E.B. De Bois to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Kendrick Lamar: how the layers of subtext in each iteration work to…
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Not a Healer
I thought, why not write the book that really scares you? At the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler talks with Colson Whitehead about his new book, The Underground Railroad, which features the underground railroad literalized as a railroad, underground.
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Friendless Female Sex Workers
Not only are these characters destined to die in the cautionary tales and to endure marriages to self-congratulatory men in the redemptions tales, they don’t even have anyone to miss them when they succumb to these fates At Hazlitt, Alana…
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Conceptualizing the Vagina
At Lit Hub, Dr. Fay Bound Alberti shares an excerpt of her new book, This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture, exploring the cultural understandings and depictions of female genitalia from Shakespeare’s “No thing” to Jamie McCartney’s The…
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Women and Workplace Fiction
Over at the New Yorker, Lydia Kiesling writes about workplace fiction, typically seen as a male-centric dominion overseen by writers like Kafka, as written by women from Helen Phillips in The Beautiful Bureaucrat to Terry McMillan in How Stella Got…
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UnREAL Gaze
Ultimately what is more real and desirable is showing savage, ambitious women rising from the ashes of a sexist society and becoming whole, instead of acting like dudes. For Tabú, Antonia Crane writes about UnREAL, a Lifetime drama highlighting destructive,…
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To Reconcile Music and Ethics
If you want to change the world, why write poetry? Wayne Koestenbaum, writing for the New York Times, takes a moment to appreciate Adrienne Rich’s body of work via the recently released Collected Poems, focusing on Rich’s ability to sing…