Features & Reviews
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A Literature for Lost Souls: Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound
Vasyakina powerfully encompasses the absurd and expansive universe of what Gogol described as the “unbridled incomprehensible Rus,” her homeland land with its terrors, its poetry and loftiness and its magic, to the skin and bones of the tender and violent…
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The Confines of Masculinity Are Killing Us: A Conversation with Joe Milan Jr.
We believe we grant access to our lives to others; I think that is an illusion.
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The Way America Treats Teens Is Unacceptable: A Conversation with Emi Nietfeld
Being affected in those ways can give us motivation to make sure that other people aren’t hurt in the same ways that we’ve been hurt.
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Food and Fraternity: Bryan Washington’s Family Meal
Reading a new book by an admired writer offers the chance to recapture the familiar pleasures of their previous work—the equivalent of ordering your favorite dish at a restaurant again, comparing it to the version that only lives in your…
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Staking Ground in Multiple Lands: A Conversation with Ghassan Zeineddine
I don’t consciously look for symbols while I’m writing; they come to me from being in the community.
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The World of Family and the Otherworldly: Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Dear Outsiders
Odd and evocative, Dear Outsiders does what literature does best—it takes the reader into a new world which changes them while it too changes.
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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.