Columns
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Writing Their Story: A Conversation with Melissa Lucashenko
I do aim to be funny and writers and booksellers tell me that my work usually is. It’s partly to soften the blow, make the hard facts of history palatable. But just as important – if not more important—is the…
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To Become a Fossil
Some people made long pilgrimages to marvel at this superlative specimen. Other people, like the girl growing up in a nearby suburb, got to know SUE through happy proximity. And because her grandma—my grandma—volunteered at the Field Museum. What I’m…
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Books That Made Me Gay: “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson
The mansion, introduced in the novel’s famous and enchanting first paragraph as, “Hill House, not sane,” is a home with a foreboding facade, an unhappy history, and walls set at angles all ever so slightly wrong.
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Miracle of the Ordinary: A Review of Ada Limon’s “Startlement”
Ada’s storytelling can be painstakingly slow and suspenseful, weaving through multiple plots and timelines. But it never fails to engage.
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Seeing Past and Under the Page in Translation: A Conversation with Heather Cleary
What I love most about translation is that it really is both an art and a craft in the sense that it’s a tremendously creative process. Every day that I sit down to work, I feel that effervescence of creative…
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Risk, Transgression and the Loyalty to Art: A Conversation with Sally Mann
“I’m still taking the picture of the road going over the hill, and when I see the road going over the hill, I screech to a stop and take it. The burden is to figure out the new way to…
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Hear the River Laugh
In the blink of an eye he slipped under. The flash of a foot popped through the river’s amber hue downstream from where he’d been. I stood on the side of the bank. Other swimmers reached into the river from…
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The Shackles of Crime: John J. Lennon’s “The Tragedy of True Crime”
There are more sides to a person than a prison sentence can reveal.
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Something New
Forcing myself, muscling through the mental pain. This is what I remember most of my own recovery. After the brief psychiatric hospitalization at eighteen, I returned for my second freshman semester hell-bent on erasing my failures, erasing the girl I’d…
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The Object of Our Attention: Marisa Meltzer’s ‘It Girl’
…what is it? And can it explain why Birkin’s life is the one we are currently examining, when there are so many others out there who likewise deserve to be “at the center of [their] own narrative”?
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A Poem Invites You, Warns You, and Then Confounds You: A Conversation with Adedayo Agarau
In The Years of Blood, though, I think what is critical is the multiple selves that exist in the collection. The I resists a single voice—sometimes dead, other times, alive and in fear—and I think that, that is fascinating to…
