Making Magic in New York City: A Conversation with Emma Straub
I'm trying to move into my Ina Garten years. Hydrangeas. Cocktails. Let's see if I can fall into that sometime this decade. Want to come?
Features & Reviews
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Just An Ordinary Apocalypse: Sasha Fletcher’s Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World
The radiant engine of this novel is neither plot or character but rather the thick bundle of arcs and associations working in tandem: angels and birds, wolves and castles, unions and debt, seasons and wine and cooking and love.
Reverse gentrification of the imagination: A Conversation with Cleyvis Natera
When I’m reading books that work within fantastic traditions, I find they’re able to hold more truths simultaneously and give me, as a reader, room to contemplate social justice and political issues and come to my own understanding of what’s what.
Teaching the Ineffable: Learning to Pray by Yahia Lababidi
. . . in the end, the poem is its own witness to something indefinable with which the poet is engaged. Whatever the poet thinks it is, the poem itself is the vehicle, the container, describing itself and gesturing beyond its words.
All the stuff I wish I had known: A conversation with Chloe Caldwell
We’re so quick to define queerness as who you sleep with or who you are attracted to, which I find so boring.
A Utopia of One’s Own: Heaven Is a Place on Earth by Adrian Shirk
. . . utopia is a living, breathing, imperfect thing that expands and grows with us. It’s always a reflection of our individual selves, of the larger communities we choose, and of the time and place we are born into.
Everyone is a comprehensive mess: The Rumpus Interview with Robert Lopez
[Your] chosen Bermuda Triangle: the battered psyche of a man, the chosen amnesia of our society, and the resultant nausea of an era.
So Much At Risk: Talking with Christopher Soto
If I am audacious enough to imagine [my] reader, then I imagine this is a person who has never had the option to look away.
Perfectly Made and Frighteningly Fragile: This Boy We Made by Taylor Harris
We must learn to see the divine even in our sorrow
The Present in Its Most Vivid Colors: A Conversation with Ben Shattuck
What does a growth of new grass on a hillside in spring make you feel? Is it a mixture of nostalgia and hope? Or what does a distant mountain range wreathed in a crown of clouds make you feel?
Clock time has really lost all meaning: An interview with Jos Charles
Some work must be done up very close.
“Do You Hearest?”: A Review of Ova Completa by Susana Thénon, tr. Rebekah Smith
Where are you, Susana Thénon?—which I think might mean: How does Thénon achieve something more than evasion and isolation with all of this wandering around? Does she land somewhere?—“In a room where if I am I’m not or I am who cares”