Features & Reviews
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Clutching to Community Over Contemporary Culture
The ways in which the group will support one another …defines how friendship can stand in direct rebellion to societal status quo
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In the Land of Beauty and Illness: A Conversation with Eshani Surya
“One of the reasons that I’ve allowed my book to exist in so many genre containers is because I’ve often felt like my own life is simultaneously a coming-of-age story, along with a surreal fabulist story, along with a medical…
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Poems Are Really for People Who Don’t Read Them: on Patricia Smith’s “The Intentions of Thunder”
Ten chapters, if you will, demarcate a full life of writing, storytelling, and keeping history. Each section opens with a prelude—an interface with the interior of a poet reviewing the lens through which the work was made then and how…
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Moving Past Shame into An Expanding: A Conversation with Belle Burden
“I was setting flame to not so much the particulars of life, but just the appearance of it and the rules that I was supposed to live by. Staying quiet about what happened to coming out of that lane to…
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You Can’t Go Home Again: The Displacement and Grief in Aracelis Girmay’s “Green of All Heads”
Colonization is central in the web of elements that shape the book toward a mournful tone. Girmay sets us up knowing we are situated in an unstable reality. Point of view and even personhood are interchangeable. Identity is lost. Through…
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Enduring “The Long Walk”
Critics have also noted that several of the characters in the film are composites of characters from the book. They have pointed out that the filmmakers conflate two memorable characters from King’s novel—Scramm and Stebbins. In the book, Scramm is…
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Magic and Beauty and Wonder: a Conversation with Aaron Burch
“The real magic of a piece comes out when you let a work become what it needs to become, and when you let go of original intent. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately: a lot of short stories,…
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The Cost of Ambition in Allie Tagle-Dokus’s “Lucky Girl”
But while the focus of the plot revolves around childhood fame, its core deals with what ambition can cost an artist
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“This Is Not a Drill”: Maggie Nelson’s New Book, “The Slicks”
…Her sensitivity to complicated dialogues about Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath is well considered
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The Pink Wooly Mammoth in the Corner: A Conversation with Rachel Eliza Griffiths
“Once I had a draft, I could step back and some of what I do love in the writing process—revision and craft, and rewriting, rewriting, rewriting—could come and help me. Writing this book felt like using guerrilla tactics to get…
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The Two-Sentence Outline that Defines the Form: An Interview with George Saunders
“Usually, I try to make things as brief as I can (my model is one of those wind-up toys and I wind it up and drop it on the floor and it races right under the couch. The end). But…
