Features & Reviews

Taking stock of her own life, she writes about what hurt, what thrilled, and what shaped her. The result is a rare behind-the-curtain view of the golden age of journalism, interwoven with glimpses of Orlean’s childhood, her evolution as a…

“A lot of pandemic novels were about a place where everyone could get away from it and not directly have to deal. I totally understand that, but as a person who was writing about it from the very beginning, probably…

“ I’ve been saying that I wrote this book to avenge her [Aaliyah]. In my mind, even in childhood, I was like, “I have to do something, whatever I can do with whatever power I have.” It just happens that…

“A lot of people think financial ruin looks like Dickensian destitution. But for many Americans, what it looks like is a never-ending credit card debt. Financial illiteracy can look very luxurious. But the way American fiction describes material possessions, and…

Pale Fire in particular I find genuinely hilarious, and thinking about “Note” now, it reads like a minor variation on that novel’s schema, with the original creator getting in the last word

The story also engages with the emotional tensions arising from the anticipated return of ’Wayne’s long-absent mother, as well as the intricacies of the relationship between ’Wayne and his sometimes overly present father.  Both relationships are portrayed with nuance and…

Something changed substantially during COVID. Housing skyrocketed. Our unhoused population skyrocketed. The opiate crisis was in full display. My wife and our son and I were living in an un-air-conditioned apartment in Cap Hill and marching in the George Floyd…

Gregor Samsa went to bed a tired, overworked salesman and woke up as a giant cockroach. Anelise Chen’s own metamorphosis was nowhere near as drastic. Clam Down: A Metamorphosis (One World, 2025) is Chen’s exploration of what it would mean…

Mystic-heretic-philosopher-poet Alina Ștefănescu’s newest collection of poetry, My Heresies (Sarabande 2025) is a radiant skirmish of families and selfhood, countries and allegiances, rules and refusals, and the force with which fraught love (is there any other kind?) bends us to…