Features & Reviews
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Magical Realism as the Savior of Memory: A Conversation with John Manuel Arias
Characters do stuff, and the reader is always going to ask “why,” and as a writer I’m just as interested.
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Child-rearing and Novel-writing: Kate Briggs’s The Long Form
THE LONG FORM reimagines both this relationship of mother-and-child and the histories and capacities of the novel. In the process, it disrupts these well-worn structures to create something delightfully new.
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“Writing is An Insistence Against a World Insisting Otherwise”: An Interview with Jessica Cuello
Literature is a balm against loneliness. I feel close to these other writers, to the characters in their books, to these women in history.
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Negotiating Grief, Shame, Loneliness, and Love: A Conversation with Vauhini Vara
When Vauhini Vara’s This is Salvaged (W.W. Norton, 2023) arrived at my doorstep, I couldn’t wait to tear through the slim collection. Vara is a master storyteller, but more than that, she is the keeper of grief and shame dealt…
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The Novelist as Playwright: Albert Camus’s Caligula and Three Other Plays
Bloom’s translations of these plays remind us that Camus was not a philosopher who used theater to illustrate arguments like Sartre, but a tragic thinker for whom drama was a fundamental and necessary means of literalizing political and ethical metaphors.
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They’re Both and They’re Neither: A Conversation with Robert Lunday
My stepfather would always tell me, “Don’t think, act. Follow orders.” For me, I want to stop to consider the different angles.
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Sketch Book Reviews: Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-runners
Seeley uses historical studies, new findings, charts/graphs, and his absolute love of bees to teach readers.
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Main Character as Witness: A Conversation with Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya
To some extent, I think I was also exploring how witnessing, absorbing, and listening are related to writing, and questioning whether this is a valuable way of approaching a life. I think it can be.
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Of Streets and Saints: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Boys Alive and Theorem
Considered together, these novels trace the triumph of consumerism over rebellion, the bourgeoisie over the underclass, capital over life.
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I See Something I Can’t Shake: A Conversation with Myronn Hardy
As a poet, I’m constantly trying to make connections and see between and among things.
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Human and No Less Miraculous: The Craft of Explication in Eugenia Leigh’s Bianca
Within Bianca, the speaker must choose the life she has over and over again, as a way forward—not as a stoic rendition of the eternal return of the same, but as desire.
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The Intimacy of the Short Story: A Conversation with Daphne Kalotay
Compassion is a window, and ideally the reader feels that—even if they’re reading a character whom they don’t necessarily like—this person is a rounded character with good qualities, bad qualities, and in-between qualities.