Features & Reviews
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The Turbulent Landscape of Identity: A Conversation with Jinwoo Chong
I’ve always wanted to write plot-driven novels that borrow from a lot of different traditions and institutions. That’s something I like most to read, and whenever I write something, I try to write something that I enjoy reading too.
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Hope is never wasted: A Conversation with Ashley M. Jones and Rebecca Gayle Howell
I’m sure you’ve seen your own versions of these stories. These truths, these stories, are everywhere. Quiet, but waiting.
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Giving Voice to Illness: A Comparative Review of Three Recent Cancer-themed Collections
All three poets contemplate the female body and the voice both literally and metaphorically, appealing to outside powers as they ponder how much a person can bear.
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No addition without subtraction: A Conversation with Hilary Leichter
As fiction writers, we’re always saying that what we write is not “real,” but as soon as we write it, it becomes a part of the world.
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Everyone sees themselves as the main character: A conversation with Larrison Campbell
When you’re writing about family, there’s what’s really relevant and has meaning to you. And then there’s what has meaning to the audience.
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I Had to Make it Mean Something: A Conversation with John Cotter
. . . the process of writing really was a devotion. It gave me a reason to keep going. And because I’m interested in formal problems, it was the crafting of sentences, finding rhythms, shaping my material that helped me…
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When the Underworld Comes Knocking: Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto
“You were a cop and then a robber and a cop again,” recalls Officer Munson. And on this fateful night, he wants Carney to play again, this time with deadly stakes.
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The Price of Power, Cannibalism, and Transmutation: A Conversation with Shanta Lee Gander
While I do see there is importance in recognizing identity, I also want there to be a broader field to go beyond the identity itself, the identities that were forced upon us, in addition to what we continue to reinforce…
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Maybe Home is the Thing We Carry: A Conversation with Janika Oza
. . . This is a story of a family trying to find their place in a world that is constantly shifting beneath them, and I wanted them and their relationships and emotions and memories at the center of this…
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Nonbinary Thinking: Stephanie Burt’s We Are Mermaids
We’re reminded that the first creatures that crawled out of the ocean were fish that evolved to walk on land. What are we if not constantly evolving?
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The Trap of Domesticity: Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo
Between a stream-of-consciousness-inspired prose, image patterns, and consistent pivots of thought, Kanai establishes the most surprising thing about this novel: its ability to make the vertiginous hypnotic.
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“A Mirror and a Window”: A Conversation with Jiordan Castle
I think the older we get, we change, but we still love what we love. We still have the same little shames and little happies and all these things that make us us from when we first started becoming whoever…