Columns
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What To Read When It’s Dangerous To Be A Girl
Fairy tales and myths are one of the oldest ways to say what’s true. When the news (the world) (the woods) is overwhelming, I reach for stories that seek to tap into that history
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Human Error Is the Point: On Teaching College During the Rise of AI
My syllabus is a mess of half-remembered intentions. I re-use icebreakers that I know don’t work. I forget to grade the first assignment until Week Four. I write emails that begin with “So sorry for the delay!” and I mean…
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Let there / be night: A Conversation with Kevin Young about “Night Watch”
The book as a whole is interested in the finding as much as the knowing and the discoveries of grief, but also of survival, and ends with a kind of paradise. I guess it’s interested in not just the underworld,…
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Labor and Trauma in the American Workplace: A Conversation with Elaine Castillo
“A lot of people think financial ruin looks like Dickensian destitution. But for many Americans, what it looks like is a never-ending credit card debt. Financial illiteracy can look very luxurious. But the way American fiction describes material possessions, and…
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Transubstantiations
I study artworks made for the cells and dining spaces in nunneries, paintings whose colors have lost their pigment, faded with age and decay, the gold leaf flecked with brown stains. A problem distracts, however: I haven’t stopped bleeding in…
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist Ed Park, on his Debut Short Story Collection, “An Oral History of Atlantis”
Pale Fire in particular I find genuinely hilarious, and thinking about “Note” now, it reads like a minor variation on that novel’s schema, with the original creator getting in the last word
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Be Clean, Be Loved
Recently, I asked my mother what she would purchase with the prize money if she won the lottery: new dishwasher, she said, or facelift. When she reminds me they do not make them the way they used to, it is…
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Books That Made Me Gay: “Summer Sisters” by Judy Blume
Having swiped my mother’s mass market paperback from her bedside, I read it while our babysitter smoked weed with her boyfriend outside.
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Groomed By the Church: How The Clash Saved My Soul
I didn’t realize it at the time, but the irreverence of The Clash was like a double-dose vaccine of skepticism, inoculating my soul against far more infectious and dangerous forces that flew into our suburban homes on the wings of…
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The Rumpus Prize in Fiction, Honorable Mention: Josie Tolin
By now the night has cooled, and the dune grass rustles beneath the mills. The light clicks off on the back porch between Trent’s house and Greta’s.
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Your Body Is Everywhere
The first time I believed “I am in danger” was when I woke up in an ambulance to EMTs sliding cold scissors up my body.
