Columns
-
Unwriting the Great American Novel: Helen DeWitt’s “Your Name Here”
The myth of the PDF is this: it is an unpublishable novel, circulated online after DeWitt despaired of getting it out by conventional channels. When I talked to my old coworker, it seemed shrouded in mystery. He didn’t even refer…
-
Breaking the Fourth Wall: A Conversation with A.A. Vacharat
The story also engages with the emotional tensions arising from the anticipated return of ’Wayne’s long-absent mother, as well as the intricacies of the relationship between ’Wayne and his sometimes overly present father. Both relationships are portrayed with nuance and…
-
White Tongue
It was senior year of high school, and a statistics study session slowly devolved into a friend and I commiserating about the shortcomings of Duolingo: there was no Tagalog course for English learners. She was the only Filipino person I…
-
Traversing the Bridge to Dystopia: A Conversation with Nini Berndt
Something changed substantially during COVID. Housing skyrocketed. Our unhoused population skyrocketed. The opiate crisis was in full display. My wife and our son and I were living in an un-air-conditioned apartment in Cap Hill and marching in the George Floyd…
-
An Excerpt from “First Time, Long Time”
He was more handsome in person, somewhere in the shallow end of his sixties, wearing a soft-looking black sweater and smelling of expensive soap. I could picture the place where the soap was purchased: one of those quiet, ritzy stores…
-
I Thought America Was the Thief: Mastery and Assimilation in Esther Lin’s “Cold Thief Place”
Lately, in my social media feed, I’ve seen a James Baldwin quote surface between news stories and advertisements: “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This…
-
The First Book: Tennessee Hill
The process of querying agents was filled with no’s that, though sad, each felt like a gentle push in the right direction towards my eventual agent Elizabeth Pratt. Once Elizabeth and I teamed up, everything happened rapidly. She did so…
-
Rocket Drive
This is the first time I’ve witnessed a person borrow food. There are many firsts in drug addiction.
-
Cycles and Stasis: On Nanae Aoyama’s A Perfect Day to Be Alone
A Perfect Day to Be Alone follows Chizu, a 20-year-old trying to make a living in her hometown by working a series of part-time jobs. When her single mother leaves Japan for a yearlong fellowship in China, Chizu moves to…
