A Ratio of Give and Take: Joyce Carol Oates’s Zero-Sum
Here, what is given, what is taken or refuted, what is owed engenders the myriad methods her characters use to shift responsibility or culpability away from themselves and onto others.
Features & Reviews
9273 posts
Allowing Space for What Isn’t Said: A Conversation with Elizabeth Acevedo
I have to know all the jokers they hold in their hand so I know how they would play or hold them—and I think it’s that level of intimacy I’m constantly trying to learn as I write.
Letting in the Light: A Conversation with Ana Maria Spagna
Remember: you are not the only voice. You are not even the decider of what’s true or not. You are the conduit for many perspectives. Maybe through these many perspectives readers can triangulate some semblance of truth. That, to me, is history.
Morally complicating your world view: A Conversation with Steve Almond
With fiction, you’re trying to get people emotionally attached to your characters, not to learn a lesson. Ideally, [readers] get emotionally attached to the characters and those characters’ experiences leave them, in the end, feeling more than they did before.
In Ardent Defense of Intellect: Susan Sontag’s On Women
Sontag parses out how women were—and are—patronized, idolized, romanced, and discarded based on proximity to their perceived expiration date, whereas men age without the same discrimination.
A Poem as a Shield and a Prayer: An Interview with Lyudmyla Khersonska
People want to have somebody helping them with the names of things, for someone may forget words during the war. A poem is like a shield and a prayer.
Balancing all the parts to the whole arc: A conversation with Cristina García
I feel like in my own experience and experience of many people I see, there is tremendous competition for narrative. For me, it’s interesting to see what pans out.
As with Vigor, As with Pain: A Review of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It
Egger’s sentences jump from one point to another, perhaps mirroring in her language how the speakers jump from one bed into another—the next temporary stop is wherever desire leads her to be.
The Cost of Belonging: Augusto Higa Oshiro’s The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu
In this vortex of language and culture, the translator’s task is all the more essential and Jennifer Shyue’s translation from Spanish is both precise and poetic. In addition to the music of the prose, Shyue does justice to the multiple vernacular at play, bringing two unlike cultures into the portrait of a single man.
“Being in Uncertainties”: A Conversation with Maureen N. McLane
A lot of poems want to place you in the darting mind of the poem. Some want to address you—as “the beloved,” say, or as someone hated, or they implicitly situate you as an overhearer of such an address. But poems can also be spaceships offering interstellar as well as time travel.
Amnesia and Abject Terror Are Prerequisites: A Conversation With Ruth Madievsky
You don’t read literary fiction if you’re looking for tight little answers to life’s mysteries.