Columns
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Sound kept
“Description is a genre and so necessarily reductive. / What feels important to know is that there are logistical concerns re: theories of death.” OR “Impossible descriptions are made more gruesome in their optimistic attempt. / Up and then not.…
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Notes from the Playground
I am four years old, standing on the playground of the Jewish Community Center where I go to nursery school. My best friend Alice is not here today. Alice is my only friend. She lives in a bigger house than…
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The Problem and Gift of Writing from Memory: A Conversation with Preeti Vangani
“I think people have started reading poetry as memoir, and I think fiction writers also suffer from that kind of readership, where everything that happened to the character has happened to the writer as well. I want to continuously challenge…
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Fiction as Containers for Memory: A Conversation with Rainbow Rowell
Rainbow Rowell writes a lot of things—comic books, graphic novels, fantasy stories with a distinct Drarry undertone (yeah, Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy kiss in certain corners of the internet)—but she doesn’t write “romance.” At least, not in the traditional…
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Silent Nights
He talked on and on then, about how you’d have to get to the airport very early in the morning or else miss your flight, the X-ray machines at the security, the little cans of soda and bags of pretzels…
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“Like a Bowl Picked Up in the Dark”: A Conversation with Brian Trapp
“I had this very intimate and intense relationship with my brother and thought I knew him best. So I could dramatize that by having it in dialogue, and then thinking about ways in which, if that’s the one true thing,…
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What Holds: Manners and Memory in “The Summer We Ate Off the China”
This refusal to treat trauma as singular or sacred, to set it apart from the texture of ordinary life, is among the collection’s quietly bracing achievements. Jacobson’s stories don’t deny suffering. But they do deny it the dignity of exception…
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Lifesaving
I wasn’t good at managing the cold. It wrestled the breath from me, pressing deep into my chest and throat. Once, when I knew Rob would be out, I cheated and put the heating on, sitting against the radiator and…
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Review: Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s “Boys Behind Glass”
This digressive style reminded me of a medievalist’s lecture I recently caught by accident—slipping into a nearly empty lecture hall, an unplanned digression of my own time. He was talking about the digressions in Beowulf, moments when the poem veers…
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“At first, everything was just ugly and scary:” A Conversation with Amanda Quaid
That reminds me of my former student, the poet Max Ritvo, who had a great image about radiation being like a just-for-you soup can. He said the first time he heard the beam, he was like, “They made it just…
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Who Deserves Your Compassion? A Conversation with Megha Majumdar
“Kolkata is one of the cities in the world which is most severely affected by climate change. It has grown hotter. It is predicted to endure more storms, and more severe storms. How does it feel to read that this…
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Sunday Scaries: “The Lurking Kind”
“They were,” I said. “He was preparing them for when they grew up. He told them about this kind of monster that lurked in the shadows and was so dark that it couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. Its…