No Way to Avoid Things Mattering: A Dream Life by Claire Messud
The placement of a marquee tent at a party or the tension between the caterer and a housekeeper take on outsized importance.
Features & Reviews
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Bringing the Exterior into our Private Rooms: A Conversation with Victoria Chang
There’s no reason for cruelty; the joy is in the writing. I always try to remember why I started doing this thing: Because I had to. It’s not a choice for many of us writers to write, but we do have a choice about whether we’re going to be nice or not.
What to Read When It’s the End of the World
. . . a list of books that I feel are worth reaching for in times like ours—some because they are apocalyptic and heavy in subject or tone, others because they are satirical, and others because of how they show parts of the world that make it worth staying in or show a world so foreign to ours that it helps medicate against some of the tunnel vision of our times
Sketch book Reviews: Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
An illustrated review of TIME IS A MOTHER by Ocean Vuong.
why deer and poetry mix so well: A conversation with Caitlin Scarano
When you say, “Oh I run, but I’m not a runner,” it’s like when people say, “Oh I write, but I’m not a writer.” You’re doing it. You just do it and it does get better and there are simple things you can do to make it easier.
On the Mystery of Eating Meat: Springer Mountain by Wyatt Williams
If you eat meat, then you are an animal who kills other animals. Humans are not alone in this, but more than all other creatures of the earth, we have gotten grotesquely good at it.
I Don’t Sing to Be Heard, I Do It to Keep On: An interview with Ashanti Anderson
“It is impossible to be at peace without understanding.”
Life is Damage: A Conversation with Claire Messud
If you’re interested in character, then you’re interested in perspective, and intimacy, and in the distinctions—and distance—between one person’s mind and another’s.
Reading Achy Obejas’s BOOMERANG/BUMERÁN as Indelible and Recursive Testimony
A review of BOOMERANG/BUMERÁN, a bilingual poetry collection from Achy Obejas available now from Beacon Press.
A Breathtaking and Terrifying Expanse: Quan Barry’s When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East
“The distances are staggering. It could take you an hour to drive to a spot on the edge of the horizon, yet that spot feels like it’s just within reach,” Barry writes. “This is what it means to live on the steppe. There are no walls between you and nature. You are nature.”
Running Straight Into the Devastation: Reyna Grande Goes to War
Reyna Grande is the author of several books, including the bestselling memoir, The Distance Between Us, (Atria, 2012) and the sequel, A Dream Called Home, released in 2018. Her latest novel, A…
What to Read When You Want to Bend Time
The works . . . interrogate time in text through myriad forms, playing with and revealing its machinations all through inventive means. Like the waves and fragments of memory, many of them swerve outside the lines of stiff categorization.