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Sketch Book Reviews: Birds and Us by Tim Birkhead

THE BIRDS AND US, written by Tim Birkhead and released August 2022 from Princeton Review Press, is atheist perfect mix of history, narrative, and science with a dash of cool illustrations. Throughout the book, readers will learn about everything from bird cave paintings, to birdwatching, and everything in between.

You Don’t See the Whole Young Man until the Very End: An Interview with Douglas Stuart

The amount of pressure on young men still to get on with it and to bottle it up and to be strong and be certain is overwhelming. And it shows in the UK. The suicide rates for men are so high. It’s a mental health issue. We don’t allow men to express themselves or talk about their vulnerability, and we blame them for a lot; we get to that phrase “toxic masculinity” really quickly. I don’t believe masculinity is always toxic, I just think sometimes it’s very unhealthy and we need to examine it and open it up.

A Sultry Register: Nichole Perkins’s Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be

In early May I was scrolling through Twitter when I came across a post from author Nichole Perkins that piqued my interest. It was a sexy tweet—in a string of…

Feeling Comfortable Enough to Be Funny Is What Makes Me Want to Write Fiction: A Conversation with Megan Giddings

There was a long stretch where I tried actively not to make things I wrote funny because of a disastrous undergrad fiction workshop where I spent thirty minutes just listening to people complain that a story had jokes. And wouldn’t it have been so much better if the author had let us pay attention to the emotions? Lol.

Calibrations: On Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality

Throughout the collection New York City reflects a unique landscape of loss, a space as full of grief as it is of everyday life, scientific facts, memory, motherhood, healing, love, and hope.

A Hypnotic Transitory Beauty Quest: A Conversation with Jackson Bliss

While many Californians are obsessed with “living in the moment,” most Asian Americans I know live in a complex cultural space where “the moment” is the superstructure and history is the base.

The Young Girl Writes Back: Elif Batuman’s Either/Or

If she just wrote about her own life, perhaps she could produce something that rivals Portrait of a Lady. Yet none of the books she reads are actually written by women.

When Silences Need to Be Broken: Talking with Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Language is inexact, and will always be an approximation. In my own experience of amnesia, there was a period of time where things didn't have names, and it was in that nameless, getting-to-know-something that I felt I knew it better.

If You Eat It, It Becomes Authentic: A Conversation About Red Sauce with Ian MacAllen

There is this moment where you must first cut yourself off from doing more research because that rabbit trail goes on forever in some cases . . . You have to ask yourself, “Do I have enough?”

Wrestling with Ghosts: Joseph Han’s Nuclear Family

“Mostly,” this novel warns us, “the dead are at peace. But when they are not, this is when they may ask something of us, attempt to guide our lives to fulfill what they could not.”

Honoring the Past That Built Us: Talking with Kali Fajardo-Anstine

All of my writing is guided by the need to feel culturally seen and acknowledged as a vital part of the American identity.

If You’re Bengali, Food is the Center of Everything: An Interview with Madhushree Ghosh

But food is not just a tool for memory, but also important in terms of social justice issues which Indian Americans don’t talk about because we are the model minority. We don’t want to get in trouble.

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