Posts by author
Kyle Williams
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The Moment of Change is the Only Poem
In poetry words can say more than they mean and mean more than they say. Over at the New Yorker, Claudia Rankine writes about the transformations Adrienne Rich underwent in search of ethics and the willful “I,” from the brief…
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Then Are You Actually Funny?
At Electric Literature, Claire Luchette interviews Rebecca Schiff, author of the recently released story collection The Bed Moved, about the forces shooting through her fiction: humor, sex, womanhood, and the in-between.
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The Person to Whom Things Happen
The question of what posture to take toward our own pain is unexpectedly complicated. How do we understand our own suffering—with what words and to what ends? For the New York Times Magazine, Parul Sehgal questions the terminology we use…
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Language as Both Salve and Poison
What I have seen, what we have seen, is language forced into the service of violence. A rhetoric of desperation and devastation molded into the incomprehensible, then vomited out in images and words that we cannot ignore though we have…
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Mapping Munro
Who else can write a story like that? Over at Lit Hub, Elizabeth Poliner, author of As Close to Us as Breathing, writes about her formative years as a writer: diagramming Alice Munro short stories to get a better sense…
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Baldwin’s Paradoxes and Epithets
Race was—is—the fundamental American issue, underlying not only all matters of public policy (economic inequality, criminal justice, housing, education) but the very psyche of the nation. Nathaniel Rich, for the New York Review of Books, writes a loving tribute to…
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The Self as a Cultural Artifact
[Memoir] comes alive at the fissures of its coherency: when a narrator is struggling to hold the self together in a text—for the reader’s sake if not also her own. Scott F. Parker met up with Maggie Nelson at AWP to…
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The Prison House of English
For the NYRB, Tim Parks meditates on writing in English through investigating various authors who made switches from native tongues to the more economically viable lingua franca, like Nabokov and Conrad—or who did the exact opposite, like Jhumpa Lahiri—all in effort to…
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Witchery and Wherefore
One thing that has become clearer and clearer in recent years is that violent extremisms are not created in a vacuum, but rather by human beings whose moral thresholds have been altered, often by resistance to societies that are failing them. At Flavorwire,…
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Burning the House Down
In the wake of Jane Eyre’s 200th birthday and Claire Vaye Watkins’s essay “On Pandering,” Bridget Read looks at the proto-feminism in Jane Eyre as eventually improved upon in the postcolonial update Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (now celebrating its…
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And So I Present Myself
The urge to claim a space for the self collides and colludes with the urge to construct a self to fit the space. Sallie Tisdale shares a beautiful essay from her newly released collected essays, Violation, in which she meditates…
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Tennis, Both Metaphor and Not
The writer, existing only in reflection, is of all beings most excluded from the highest realms. Over at the New Yorker, John Jeremiah Sullivan writes about the prominence of tennis in the works of David Foster Wallace—in both Wallace’s fiction…