Features & Reviews
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A Dance of One’s Own: Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera
The return of someone deceased is a common enough trope, but where it is normally horrific . . . Polek initially runs jolly with it.
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Everything in Our Lived Presence is Interconnected: A Conversation with Ellen van Neerven
Sport is seen as characterizing a nation. If there’s a sense of injustice and inequality in the fabric of what a nation says it is, then how does that trickle down to everyday life?
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Sophomore efforts: A Conversation Between Rachel Khong and Crystal Hana Kim
“Debut” holds the ring of promise, where disappointment feels intrinsic to the word “sophomore.” For better or worse, people love to call second books “sophomore” novels, with all its accompanying connotations.
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So Foreign Yet So Familiar: Three Early Novels by Amit Chaudhuri
But Chaudhuri pays keen attention to these seemingly self-evident truths, articulating what we think we know but keep forgetting.
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To Name and Document, Cherish and Remember: A Conversation with Sarah Ghazal Ali
I am moved by the revelation that comes but does not announce itself, as a powerful ending or climax might, but waits to be returned to and recognized.
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A Fierce Kind of Hope: A Conversation with Brooke Shaffner
I don’t think we can find a way forward without facing what we have done to each other and our home.
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A Comedy of Venture Capitalism: Ryan Chapman’s The Audacity
PrevYou is the hottest startup in Silicon Valley . . . The only problem? The claims are phony.
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“Pregnancy as a Haunted House:” A Conversation with Clare Beams
To me [metaphor] feels connected to the heart of fiction: I’m making a whole fantastical thing in order to capture the essence of a real state or feeling, in order to give myself a language for it.
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Between Conceptualism and Hyperpop in Michael Chang’s Synthetic Jungle
Here, failure to be “personal” reveals the unconscious biases that structures readers’ expectations of what counts as “personal.”
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Elegy and Echo: A Conversation with Callie Siskel
Poetry is the form of brevity. I wonder if his artistic view ultimately inspired me.
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Seeing What You Can’t Hear: Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test
. . . ruminations on the creative process and what it means when your sense of self is upended through a series of small violences capture the mundanity in trudging through a long-term illness.
